Free flight trackers keep shrinking their history. Flightradar24 now needs a subscription for anything older than 12 hours, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, and ADS-B Exchange ended its free API.
So I built Velocity. It runs on your own machine (docker compose up, no API keys) and records every aircraft and ship position it sees to your own disk. Mine has 132M positions since August in 27 GB of SQLite. Drag the scrubber and the map rewinds; for aircraft it can also pull public readsb archives back to 2024.
What I use it for
- An alert when a military or emergency aircraft enters an area I care about, pushed to my phone through ntfy.
- Checking what was flying or sailing near something after it made the news.
Things I cared about
- Every contact says where it came from. Each aircraft and ship shows which feeds reported it and how old the fix is, so a stale dot doesn't pretend to be live.
- Your own receiver counts. Point it at your tar1090 and it folds that in.
- The history is a byte budget you set, not a paywall.
- It answers agents too. It runs as an MCP server, so an AI agent can ask what is flying near a place right now and get sourced positions back.
What's rough
Coverage is only as good as the public feeds and thin over oceans. The 3D globe wants a decent GPU (there's a lighter 2D map). And I wrote it with a lot of help from Claude Code; I review every change and there are 3,159 backend tests.
Repo: https://github.com/AndrewCTF/velocity (AGPL-3.0)
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