Aviation and maritime: coverage, timing and estimates

Where aircraft and vessel positions come from, where they are missing, and what is projected.

What you get: You can read an aircraft or vessel mark knowing how old it is, whether it is observed or projected, and why parts of the map are silent.

Steps

Open Desks → "Aviation desk" (traffic, SIGMETs, US airport delays, GPS interference, satellites) or "Maritime desk" (vessels, ports and chokepoints, waves, sea temperature, buoys, tides).
Click an aircraft or vessel for its identity, last position time and state.
Watch the state mark: observed, aging (the fix is getting old), or estimated (a dead-reckoned projection from the last course and speed).

Why the ocean is quiet

Vessel positions come from AIS radio received by volunteer shore stations. Far from shore nobody is listening: on 30 August 2026, 182 of 2,592 five-degree cells heard anything at all. An empty ocean means no receiver, not no ships.

Aircraft

Aircraft are recent ADS-B positions from a community network; coverage follows its receivers. The layer starts off, because an empty sky with the layer on would read as a claim.

What success looks like

You can say how old a position is and whether it was received or projected.

Limits to know

Aircraft and vessels do not replay: there is no position archive, so scrubbing back does not show where they were.
Ahead of now, vessel marks are projections from course and speed, not predictions of where a ship will really be.
FAA delays cover United States airports only.