Visualize Your Flight History with AirTrail

Ever looked at your flight history and wondered what it actually looks like on a map? Or maybe you're curious about your carbon footprint from travel, or just want a cool visual representation of where you've been. AirTrail is a modern, open-source dashboard that turns your personal flight data into an interactive visualization.

Built with Svelte and TypeScript, this project isn't just another map tool. It's a personal project that tackles a common developer itch: taking your own data and making it visually interesting and insightful. It's the kind of side project that feels useful and looks great.

What It Does

AirTrail is a web application that ingests flight data—typically exported from services like Apple Maps, Google Maps, or flight tracking apps—and displays it on an interactive globe. It parses flight details including dates, routes, and aircraft, then plots each leg of your journey. The result is a clean, animated visualization of your personal air travel history.

Why It's Cool

The clever part isn't just the visualization, but the approach. The project is built with modern, efficient tools: Svelte for a fast and reactive UI, and D3.js for the powerful map and data rendering. This combination keeps the bundle size small and the animations smooth.

It also handles the messy part: data ingestion. The repository includes logic to parse and normalize flight data from different export formats, which is often the biggest hurdle in personal data projects. The UI is thoughtfully designed with a dark theme, clean typography, and intuitive controls to filter and explore your flights by year or aircraft type. It turns a raw data export into a storytelling tool about your own travels.

How to Try It

You can check out a live demo right now. The project's GitHub repository has all the instructions, but here's the gist:

1. Head to the GitHub repo: github.com/johanohly/AirTrail
2. Check out the README.md for details on how to export your flight data from common services.
3. Clone the repo and run it locally (it's a standard SvelteKit project—just npm install and npm run dev).
4. Drop your own flight data (in a supported format like JSON) into the app and watch your personal map populate.

The code is clean and well-structured, so it's also a great reference if you're learning Svelte or how to work with geo-visualizations.

Final Thoughts

AirTrail is a perfect example of a practical, self-contained developer project. It solves a real, albeit niche, problem and does it with style and modern tech. Even if you're not a frequent flyer, the codebase is worth a look for its clean Svelte implementation and data handling patterns. It might inspire you to build your own dashboard for a different dataset—be it workouts, coffee consumption, or code commits.

For the traveler-developer, it's a fantastic way to see your journeys in a new light. Give it a try and see where you've been.

Follow for more cool projects: @githubprojects