Maps Now Show Sunlit Earth, Visualizing Day/Night Around the World

Last month, we released our all-new mapping platform and engine that replaces all the underlying software that makes FlightAware's flight tracking maps on the web. Aside from performance improvements and a a few dozen small bug fixes, most of you probably didn't notice much change.

More importantly, the new mapping platform makes it possible for us to rapidly deploy new, cool features to the maps, so you should expect to see ongoing and frequent updates, improvements, and new features over the coming weeks and months.

Just today, we released an awesome new feature -- sunlit earth. We now shade the map to indicate where it's dawn, day, night, and dusk! It really helps when tracking long-haul flights to understand the time of day around the world and the conditions of the flight.

Here are a couple examples:

You can see that when tracking this flight (Singapore 305 from London to Singapore) it looks great in both the FlightAware Blue (Classic) map and also the satellite imagery. It provides a lot of context about the flight, the origin, and the destination.

We really hope you like the new feature and look forward to many, many more -- soon!

FlightAware Development Team