Military Radar

Live military aircraft, emergency-service helicopters and the largest transports over Poland — with a push alert when one comes close to you.

radar-wojskowy.netlify.app

The app itself is in Polish.

What it shows

Military	aircraft tagged as military by adsb.fi, plus ones the app identifies itself — by ICAO address blocks, callsigns (RCH, SAVER, DUKE…) and squawks 7777 / 7400
Service helicopters	air ambulance (LPR), police, border guard and foreign rescue services — confirmed rotorcraft only
Heavy aircraft	Boeing 747, An-124, An-225

Each category can be switched off — it then disappears from the map and stops sending alerts.

Features

• Live map — refreshed every 5 s with smooth icon movement; 40+ silhouettes (fighters, tankers, transports, helicopters, drones) coloured by altitude
• Aircraft card — photo from Planespotters, type, country, altitude with climb/descent trend, speed, flight time and likely landing airfield
• Flight trail — up to 4 hours of history stored server-side, recorded even when nobody has the app open
• Push notifications — an alert when an aircraft enters a chosen radius around your position, even with the app closed (on iPhone after adding it to the home screen)
• Inbound heavies — Boeing 747s and An-124s whose flight plan says Rzeszów (EPRZ) or Kraków (EPKK): shown on the map hours before they reach Polish airspace, with destination, estimated landing time and time to go, plus a push alert; per-airport switches
• Rare aircraft alerts — tankers, AWACS, reconnaissance, bombers and surveillance drones anywhere over Poland, regardless of your position (one alert per aircraft per 12 h)
• Overlays — Polish military airfield grounds (red), major NATO bases (purple) and 12 military training areas (orange, hatched)
• Airspace active now — military zones (TSA, TRA, D, R) reserved for specific hours right now in the Polish airspace use plan (drone corridors and all-day blanket reservations are left out), with hours, altitudes, the reserving base and aircraft type (e.g. TS7 · F-35 · Łask · 10:00–11:00)
• Airfield card — tap a military airfield to see what is planned from it today in the PANSA plan (e.g. F-35 · 10:00–12:10 · TS6, TS7) and what is airborne within 50 km
• Six base maps — dark, classic, satellite, neutral dark, satellite with labels (hybrid), terrain
• PWA — installs like a native app on phone and desktop

Data sources

Source	Used for
adsb.fi /v2/mil	global list of military aircraft
adsb.fi /v2/lat/…/lon/…/dist/250	all traffic over Poland — catches military aircraft that /mil does not tag
OpenSky Network	fallback when adsb.fi is down (no type or registration)
Planespotters.net	aircraft photos
Wikimedia Commons	freely licensed type photos shown when no photo of the individual airframe exists (credited on the card)
OpenStreetMap	airfield and training-area outlines
PANSA AUP/UUP	daily airspace use plan — which military zones are reserved, when and by whom (informative only)
adsb.lol	second global military list (different receiver network — each source has its own gaps) and lookup by aircraft type
adsbdb	flight routes by callsign — ADS-B itself carries no destination

ADS-B does not carry a take-off time, so flight time counts from the earliest trail point the server knows — a lower bound, not an exact value.

How it works

flowchart LR
  A[adsb.fi / OpenSky] --> F[aircraft<br/>on request, every 5 s]
  A --> C[collect<br/>cron every 2 min]
  F --> B[(Netlify Blobs<br/>4 h trails)]
  C --> B
  F --> P[PWA<br/>React + Leaflet]
  B --> P
  A --> N[notify<br/>cron every 1 min]
  N -->|Web Push| P

Function	Role
aircraft	fetches and classifies traffic, returns the trail of a selected aircraft
collect	records trails in the background every 2 minutes
notify	checks every subscriber's radius each minute and sends push alerts
airspace	proxies and trims the PANSA airspace use plan (no CORS upstream), cached 10 min
inbound	serves 747s and An-124s bound for Rzeszów or Kraków
inbound-collect	refreshes that list every 10 minutes (adsb.lol + adsbdb) so page traffic never reaches those services
subscribe / status / test-push	subscription storage, diagnostics, test push

Running locally

npm install
npx netlify dev      # Vite + Netlify Functions

Plain npm run dev starts only the UI — the map stays empty and the status mark in the corner turns red.

Push notifications need VAPID keys (npx web-push generate-vapid-keys) — see .env.example.

npm test             # vitest
npm run lint         # eslint
npm run build        # production build to dist/

Deployment: every push to main is built automatically on Netlify.

Project structure

netlify/functions/   aircraft, airspace, collect, notify, subscribe, status, test-push
  lib/               military classification, Poland boundary, security
src/
  components/        map, aircraft card, panels, SVG silhouettes
  data/              airfield and training-area outlines
  lib/               palette, geometry, type names, photo matching
  airfields.js       airfields: Polish military, civil, NATO bases
test/                vitest tests

License

Code: MIT © 2026 Maciej Poręba.

Map data and the airfield and training-area outlines in src/data/ come from © OpenStreetMap contributors and are available under the ODbL. Aircraft data belongs to adsb.fi and OpenSky Network, the airspace use plan to PANSA (Polska Agencja Żeglugi Powietrznej), photos to their authors on Planespotters.net — each under its own terms.