Sky Boids

Chapter 5 is flocking: separation, alignment, cohesion. This expansion drops a flock into real airspace.

The page fetches the current ADS-B aircraft states in a bounding box over the Alps from the OpenSky Network and draws each plane as an orange arrow pointing along its true heading. Then a flock of boids runs the usual three rules plus one more: a separation force away from every real aircraft. So the emergent flocking has to negotiate with actual traffic, and you can see how wide the avoidance radius has to be before the boids stop clipping through planes.

Data source: The OpenSky Network states API
Endpoint: https://opensky-network.org/api/states/all?lamin=45&lomin=5&lamax=48&lomax=11
Access: Public, no key. Loaded from an hourly server-side refresh when possible, with a bundled snapshot fallback, and a live browser fetch only when the API allows CORS. Data window: Jul 18, 2026 (pulled Jul 18, 2026 UTC)

The number of aircraft depends on the time of day you open it; over Europe in daytime the box is usually busy.