Pilots do a lot, and almost nobody sees it.
A long rotation is five countries, six legs, and a few days of your life. When it is over, what is left? A few lines in a logbook and, if you are lucky, a photo or two on your phone. Friends, family, and sometimes even colleagues have no idea what actually happened.
I wanted to change that, so I built FlightReal.
Bringing the logbook to life
FlightReal is a web app that turns flights into a cinematic 3D replay, and it is free to try. It is meant for pilots, and for anyone who wants the flying behind a trip to be visible. There is nothing to install, and you do not need an account to try it.
All you need is a tail number
This is the part I like best. You type in a tail number, and FlightReal finds the aircraft's recent flights from public ADS-B data and adds them to a trip for you. No typing in airports, no copying times from a logbook. The replay then starts on its own.
If you prefer to keep things manual, you can add flights yourself or import a ForeFlight or LogTen export.
A globe, not a spreadsheet
Each leg animates as an arc on a 3D globe, with a camera that follows the aircraft along the route. At the end you get a summary: flights, countries, airports, total distance, and the furthest leg. Suddenly a rotation reads like a story instead of a column of numbers.
Your pictures go on the route
Pilots take photos. Add them to a flight and they appear as small cards that float along the route while the replay plays. Tap one to pause and see it full size, then carry on.
Made for Instagram
I wanted sharing to be simple, not an editing project. FlightReal makes vertical 9:16 clips that fit Instagram Stories, and it can generate a set of pre-made posts for a trip, such as a route map and a stats card. They are rendered right in your browser: download them and post.
Privacy first, because it has to be
In corporate aviation, discretion is part of the job. The flights themselves come from public ADS-B data, so FlightReal's privacy is about what the app keeps and what it shares, and that starts from the pilot's side:
- Your trips live on your own device first. They only go to a server if you create an account and choose to sync.
- Nothing is public by default. A share link exists only if you create one, and you can switch it off again.
- Trip photos are only shown publicly if you turn that on.
- Photos are re-encoded in your browser before upload, which removes camera metadata such as GPS location.
- The analytics are self-hosted and never record tail numbers, trip names, or photos.
Why I built it
I built FlightReal myself, and it runs on my own servers. I come from a technology background and I fly for a living, and this project is where those two worlds meet. If you fly, try it with your own tail number and see what your last few weeks look like from above.