This app displays air traffic and its proximity from you based on your location (and accuracy) using the Geolocation API, then it shows the position on Google Maps using the Google maps react API, finally it takes airplane data using the OpenSky Network API and makes a react object for each plane and plots it on the same Google Map.
The Map will take a few moments to render (only showing California region at the moment to speed up render)
Approximately every 10 seconds the plane positions will be updated
The Geolocation API detects latitude and longitude coordinates by using your computer or phones GPS if available. If not avaliable, it uses its WIFI signal. If using a mobile signal, the position is triangulated by cell towers to work out the closest latitude and longitude it can determine.
The Google Map React API utilizes a smaller set of the Google Maps API and allows you to render and React component on Google Maps. This allows us to make the planes and they can even be placed before the map is loaded. Another feature which I entend to use is that you can make hoverable objects, in the future this will display individual plane data when hovered.
The OpenSky Network API gathers flight/plane data from multiple other sources. It relies on ADS-B API, which tracks each aircraft (transponder) to a unique address (ICAO 24-bit) which is an aircrafts unique identifier (sometimes called mode-s and is the aircrafts certificate of registration). The API then gathers the elevation, latitude, longitude, direction, and other characteristics from other APIs and volenteers across the world who supply the data through Raspberry Pis with an SDR and Antenna, so military and other filtered aircraft can be often seen (public tracking).