Apocalypse Early Warning System

Apocalypse Early Warning System – “In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse. built by Kyle McDonald / GitHub / Telegram Notifications / RSS / Discord Bot [h/t Pete Weiss]

This site watches a fixed cohort of business jets and asks a simple question: is the number currently airborne unusual for this time? It is not tracking all aircraft. The original version used an FAA-only business-jet list. The current tracker builds a broader global aircraft metadata table by merging ADS-B Exchange aircraft records, Mictronics/tar1090 records, and FAA registry data by ICAO hex. The importer classifies metadata into business jets, military aircraft, large airliners, regional airliners, non-jet aircraft, and other known types, then applies a practical business-jet filter. Each tracked aircraft is matched in live data by its ICAO hex identifier. The flight data comes from ADS-B Exchange heatmap files. Those files are published in half-hour slots and encode recent aircraft positions. The backend downloads the newest available heatmap, parses it, matches the aircraft in the heatmap against the tracked cohort, and stores the latest position, altitude, speed, heading, and airborne state for each match. Military aircraft and non-ICAO addresses are published as separate dashboard snapshots and loaded only when their toggles are enabled. Historical context comes from the same heatmap format. The backfill job walks through previous half-hour slots, counts how many business jets were airborne, and records those counts in SQLite. The dashboard then compares the current concurrent airborne count with an all-history weekly baseline for the same half-hour of the week. The model also learns local half-hour profiles around U.S. federal holidays, so predictable holiday travel is included in the prediction instead of treated as a generic spike…”