What a demo becomes in three weeks

Ampron Sky started as a radar for our office wall. Three weeks later it is an aviation tool built for professionals too. The interesting part isn't the code. It's what decides what gets built.

On 12 October we built a radar for the wall of our office in Peetri. It showed the aircraft within 50 km of us, drawn like an old green CRT scope, and the idea was simple: a display maker needs something live on a screen that proves the whole chain works. My AI executives and I built it in a day.

We didn’t stop there. Today Ampron Sky is at version 1.8.0, after 121 numbered releases between 17 and 31 October. It shows air traffic the way a controller would recognise it: an approach radar scope, an airport tower view, the airspace in 3D, and whatever is overhead when you point your phone at the sky. It has aviation weather, the airspace restrictions that NOTAMs switch on, and figures that describe how airports perform. Every day it measures how many aircraft over the Baltic lose satellite positioning and where the jamming most likely comes from. On 17 October that was more than half of all the aircraft Sky recorded. The green scope is still there, as one of the themes.

It is free, with no ads and no account.

What I find most interesting is what decides what gets built. Writing the code is no longer the bottleneck. Knowing what a controller expects to see is. So is knowing that a missing hour must show as missing, not as zero, and that a jammer’s location is an estimate with a radius, not a dot on a map. An app that looks professional but stays quiet about the gaps in its data is worse than no app. Sky’s rules are decisions like that: what to show, what to label, what to leave out.

That is where a small company can now compete. Ampron has built displays for Tallinn Airport since 2017. We know what the apron and the de-icing crews need to see, because our screens are there. Sky makes that knowledge public. A year ago, a tool like this would have meant hiring a software team or waiting for a supplier’s roadmap. Now the scarce part is knowing the domain, and the building follows.

It also changes how you show what you know. A brochure says you understand aviation data. A free tool that aviation people can open and check says it better, every day. And if it’s wrong, anyone can see it. That is a harder test, and a better one.

Sky is still a demo, not a product. It runs on public data from volunteers’ receivers, coverage is thin in places, and it is not for navigation. But somewhere along the way it stopped being just a test card.

More on what Sky does: Ampron Sky: from a wall radar to a live picture of the sky.