RealTraffic - fly with live and real air traffic in your simulator

...and now with real global weather!

Live statistics: Total time flown by all users since January 2017: 57088.12 days ( = 156 years, 4 months, 26 days )

RealTraffic_icon_32x32 How does it work, and what does it do?

RealTraffic consolidates data from multiple international ADS-B and multilateration networks to obtain information about other airplanes near the position of your (simulated) aircraft - in realtime, live! Depending on which simulator you are flying, it then injects this traffic so you can fly with it, or follow it.

As of version 8, RealTraffic also provides global coverage of real-time (and 7 day historical) high resolution satellite images. This allows for a fully immersive experience giving you the real world flying experience even in the remotest corners of the planet (note that this refers to satellite images and may not include traffic). You can choose between The satellite imagery is a separate subscription. To keep the basic RealTraffic pricing as low as possible, you only pay for what you want. This gives those of you who are as excited as we are about this new level of reality and immersion the option to experience the ultimate real world flying experience while not excluding anyone on a tighter budget to still use the basic traffic functionality. You can imagine that processing the entire planet in 500 meters per pixel resolution and multiple wavelength bands from raw satellite data every 10 minutes puts significant strain on compute and bandwidth resources!

Supported Flight Simulators

Simulator Support
FSX/P3D/MSFS Fully supported using the PSXT add-on, and via LiveTraffic (see X-Plane entry for details below).
Aerowinx PSX Fully supported natively. Allows injection of up to 7 aircraft (PSX limitation). Traffic is shown both in the windshield and the TCAS system.
X-Plane Supported via the LiveTraffic plugin. Check https://twinfan.gitbook.io/livetraffic/setup/installation for information on how to install this with X-Plane. Or check their Forum link for LiveTraffic support.
Spotter Mode Manually select your position from the airport list or enter latitude/longitude manually. Don't use this mode if you're flying with a simulator, as obviously RealTraffic will not follow your position.
To the right: A typical summer day in Florida, USA: Airplanes flying into Miami are doing the slalom around thunderstorms in the area. With the new real-time satellite enhanced RealTraffic, you can now see the weather and airplanes flying around it.
Version 8.3.94: In spotter mode, you can display air traffic in any area you manually enter - either by selecting an airport, or by manually entering the latitude/longitude of the point of interest. This will broadcast traffic on the network in the same way as if you were running a simulator. This allows you to view traffic in third party EFB apps such as Foreflight without the overhead of having to run the full flight simulator software. If you want traffic to be available wherever your simulator is however, you should not use spotter mode, as traffic is only displayed in an approximately 100 NM radius around the current position.

Download links for version 8.3.94

VERY IMPORTANT, PLEASE READ PRIOR TO PURCHASING A LICENSE: Download for Windows (45MB) | Download for OS X (1.5MB) |  Download for Linux (1.5MB)

Professional Edition Licenses

BEST VALUE
12 month license (all platforms) USD $179.99

25% discount on monthly		 6 month license (all platforms) USD $95.99

20% discount on monthly		 3 month license (all platforms) USD $47.99

20% discount on monthly		 1 month license (all platforms) USD $19.99

Standard Edition Licenses

BEST VALUE
12 month license (all platforms) USD $89.99

25% discount on monthly		 6 month license (all platforms) USD $47.99

20% discount on monthly		 3 month license (all platforms) USD $23.99

20% discount on monthly		 1 month license (all platforms) USD $9.99

NOAA are flying their P3 Orion through Hurricane Dorian (use the time slider to go to September 1 2019, 13:55 UTC):

Current traffic status

The plot below updated every minute shows a red dot for every aircraft being tracked at 10'000ft or lower, and a blue dot for every aircraft higher than 10'000ft. The red dots overplot the blue dots, this is to show where there is lower flying traffic, and it also highlights to a lesser degree where the coverage could be improved. Click on the map for a larger resolution version:

And the combined coverage seen in the last 24 hours:

Current satellite status

True color (day) / Infrared (night) composite. Satellites (left to right): GOES17 / GOES16 / Meteosat 10 / Meteosat 8 / Himawari 8

Installation

Windows 7/8/9/10

Simply run the setup executable, agree to the terms, and finish the install. You'll note that both the setup and the executable are cryptographically signed so you can be sure that what you're installing is exactly what Inside Systems Pty Ltd (the creator of RealTraffic, i.e. me) have released. RT is written in Java. That means it requires a java runtime environment (JRE) to work with the underlying hardware - it's because of this that RT works on all three major platforms Windows, Mac, and Linux. Occasionally, the JRE's can be too outdated on your machine, or have been poorly installed or corrupted. If that's the case it's not always entirely evident. If you are unable to enter your license key and you always receive a license validation error even after entering it correctly (make sure you copy paste it to avoid typing errors!), a corrupt JRE is one possible scenario. In that case, either fix the JRE by updating your local Java installation, or, to make it easy for you, just download and install the "Standalone" version, which comes bundled with the JRE.

MacOS

Simply mount the dmg, drag and drop the icon into the Application folder shortcut on the dmg (or in finder, it does the same thing), and run it. When first running it, you will need to right-click it and select open. Then acknowledge the security warning. Make sure you have a current version of the java runtime environment (JRE) installed. Or, just download and run the standalone version if you don't want to clutter your system with a JRE.

Linux

Unpack the tgz, and run the built in ./start.sh script from terminal (or double click it in your favourite file browser). You'll need to have a current JRE installed.

Configuring RealTraffic for use

Once the application has been installed and the license number entered, use "Spotter Mode" to verify you can see any traffic. Select an airport in the dropdown list (or type the first letters of the ICAO code for the airport to very quickly select the correct one, e.g. EDDF for Frankfurt). If no traffic is displayed now, go to the Fault Finding section below. Then select the simulator you are using from the dropdown list: PSXT, LiveTraffic, or Aerowinx PSX. Done! Happy flying with RealTraffic!

Fault finding / debugging instructions

Firstly, please remember that RealTraffic only works natively with the PSX 747-400 flight simulator software. If you are using X-Plane, FSX or P3D, you are using a plugin someone else has written to bring traffic into your simulator. For FSX/P3D, this is Nico's PSXT addon - and whatever problem you're having most likely originates in that corner of the universe. Please check out his forum here if that's the case: https://www.avsim.com/forums/forum/819-psxseecontraffic-for-fsx-p3d/. If you're using X-Plane 11, you're using Birger Hoppe's LiveTraffic plugin. Please see his forum for support.

If the RealTraffic window does not appear after starting RealTrafficLauncher, delete the RealTraffic.ini file. On Windows, this file is located here: C:\Users\<your username>/AppData/InsideSystems/. On MacOS it's in ~/Documents/.InsideSystems, and on Linux it's in ~/.InsideSystems

macOS specific guidance if RealTrafficLauncher fails to start
  1. Drag the RealTrafficLauncher app into the Applications folder from the downloaded DMG.
  2. Open a terminal window (go to Applications/Utilities in Finder and start the terminal)3. On the command prompt, enter this command: java -jar /Applications/RealTrafficLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/Jars/RealTrafficLauncher.jar
  3. If this worked, you're all set, and the RT window will show after it has started.  If it didn't work because java couldn't be found, you have to install the java runtime environment (JRE). Go here https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase-jre8-downloads.html and download and install the "macOS x64 installer", and repeat the steps above. You won't need to reboot, but you will need to close the terminal (type exit <enter> at the command prompt) and re-open a new terminal AFTER installing the JRE before you try to re-enter the command above.
  4. For most installations, double clicking the RealTrafficLauncher.app icon should now work as well.
If you still think there is a problem with RealTraffic and it doesn't behave as expected, follow these few simple steps to help with debugging. RealTraffic has been shown to run on thousands of computer configurations without problems. It's been tested on Windows 7/8/10, OS X, and Linux.

Information for developers

This brief PDF document explains how to interface RealTraffic so you can make use of traffic whichever way you would like to. Click here to download the document v.1.4.

Release history

8.3.94 8.3.92 8.3.91 8.3.88 8.3.84 8.3.83 8.3.81 8.2.79 7.2.71 7.0.68 7.0.64 7.0.57 skipping ancient history... 1.1.13