Stowaway turns live flight tracking into a window seat in the sky

A new web service called Stowaway turns live flight tracking into a view. Instead of a plane icon sliding across a map, it renders the sky that aircraft is flying through — your horizon, your time of day and the stars that are actually out tonight — and places you in a seat aboard. Nothing needs to be installed: it runs in a modern browser on a desktop, tablet or phone, and is free to use without an account.

Real data behind the rendering

The developers say everything drawn is derived from something real. The aircraft are at their actual positions, the satellites follow their actual orbits, and the star field is calculated for wherever the user happens to be. Most of it changes while you watch. Flight positions come from ADS-B, the public radio signal that aircraft broadcast and that volunteer receivers around the world relay; coverage is thick over Europe and North America and patchier over oceans and remote regions. The company warns that it is not a navigation tool.

Satellites, including the space station

The same view includes the International Space Station, Starlink satellites, weather satellites and tracked orbital debris, all placed according to the public catalog astronomers use. Because the sky itself — stars, planets and satellites — is computed from the user's location, that part works anywhere in the world.

Free sky, paid extras and an assistant called Roger

The sky, the planes and the satellites are all free. Supporters get sharper ground imagery showing real buildings and streets — considerably more detailed than ordinary satellite images — along with extra features; the site says the paid tier is also what keeps the free version free, with no advertising and no selling of user data. Supporters can also ask Roger, the service's AI assistant, for a view in plain language — for example "put me over the Alps" — and it selects a flight and seats the viewer in it. Roger is named after the radio call.

Privacy and limits

Location data is used only to work out which sky to draw, and it is not retained: there are no accounts, no data sold to advertisers or brokers, and no history of what users have looked at. Aircraft coverage depends entirely on volunteer ADS-B receivers, so the experience is uneven away from well-covered regions, and the team stresses that it should not be used for navigation. Early reactions have been enthusiastic; one widely shared comment on Reddit called it "the coolest new site I've seen in quite some time".