Flight Deck

Seven aviation tools for the Elgato Stream Deck. No account, no API key, worldwide.

Getting started

Every action works the moment you drag it onto a key. Most need only an airport code; the radar needs nothing at all.

1. Drag an action from the Flight Deck category onto a key.
2. Type a 4‑letter ICAO airport code into the settings panel that appears.
3. Press the key — almost every key pages through more information rather than doing something. That is where most of the plugin lives.

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Flight Bag

Put any aviation website on a key, with the airport code filled in for you.

Pick one of the 32 curated links or paste your own URL. Set an airport code once and {ICAO} or {IATA} anywhere in the URL is replaced with it, so the same key follows whichever airport you are working with today.

Example. A custom link of https://example.com/notams?apt={ICAO} with the airport set to EGLL opens https://example.com/notams?apt=EGLL.

Regions

NOTAMs, briefing services and medical resources are national by nature — there is no world NOTAM office. The curated links are grouped by authority (FAA, EUROCONTROL and NATS, NAV CANADA, Airservices Australia, worldwide) and every entry is tagged [US ONLY], [EUROPE] and so on. Custom URLs work anywhere.

If the key says PICK A SITE

Nothing has been chosen yet. Open the key's settings and choose a link, or type a custom URL. CHECK URL means something was typed but it is not a usable http or https address.

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Airport Weather

Live METAR and TAF for any airport in the world, in the standard colors.

Type a 4‑letter ICAO code. The key shows the flight category in the color every pilot already knows, and pressing it pages through four screens:

1. Category — VFR, MVFR, IFR or LIFR, with temperature, wind and cloud.
2. Detail — full wind including gusts, visibility, and the ceiling. The age of the observation is in the small caption at the top.
3. Forecast — whether a TAF exists and the window it covers. A TAF is a paragraph of coded text and a key is five characters wide, so it deliberately does not try to summarise one.
4. Sun — the next sunrise or sunset in Zulu, a countdown to it, and the civil twilight either side.

Airport codes

Use the ICAO code. A 3‑letter code is assumed to be a US airport and gets a K in front, which is right for the mainland US (DFW becomes KDFW) and wrong everywhere else: London Heathrow is EGLL, not KLHR. Honolulu is PHNL and Anchorage is PANC, so those need the full code too.

NO REPORT

That airfield does not file a METAR — common for small strips. It is not an error, and it is deliberately shown differently from a network problem, which names its own cause (TIMEOUT, NO DNS).

Sunset is not the end of legal day VFR

Both are on the key because they are different times, often half an hour apart. In the US, position lights are required from sunset to sunrise, but the definition of night for logging and for carrying passengers hangs on civil twilight. The times are computed, accurate to about a minute, and do not model terrain — a field in a valley loses the sun earlier than the calculation says. Above the Arctic Circle the key reads UP or DOWN rather than inventing a time.

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Runway Wind

Crosswind and headwind components for a runway you name.

Set an airport and a runway designator (18, 04R, 36L). The key reads:

• XW12L — twelve knots of crosswind, from the left.
• HW23 — twenty‑three knots of headwind.
• TW04 — four knots of tailwind. This always turns the key red, whatever the crosswind is doing, because it is a different hazard and your crosswind limit says nothing about it.

Pressing the key pages through the same figures computed at the gust speed, then the raw wind, the runway's heading and the variation being used.

The magnetic variation box — read this one

A coded METAR reports wind relative to true north. Runway numbers are relative to magnetic north. They are two different norths, and the difference between them is why the tower's spoken wind never quite matches the written report.

Across most of the continental US the gap is a few degrees and leaving the box at 0 is fine. It is around 15°E at Seattle, 16°W in Maine, and over 20° in Alaska and much of Scandinavia — and at 25 knots, a 20° error moves the crosswind component by roughly 8 knots. That is the difference between comfortable and beyond the demonstrated crosswind of a light single. Enter your field's variation, east positive.

The color is your judgment, not ours

The key turns amber within 20% of the crosswind limit you set and red at or above it. The default is 15 knots because that is a common demonstrated crosswind for a light single — but a 172 pilot, an airline pilot and a taildragger pilot have three different answers and only you know which is yours. Change it in the key's settings.

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Density Altitude

What the airplane thinks the altitude is.

Set an airport. The key shows density altitude, and beneath it how far above the field elevation that is — which is the part you actually feel on the take‑off roll. Pressing it pages through pressure altitude with the altimeter setting, then the raw inputs: field elevation, outside air temperature and the ISA deviation.

Where the numbers come from

Temperature and altimeter setting come from the live METAR; field elevation comes from the reporting station itself. At a large airport the station can sit a few tens of feet from the touchdown zone, and at a handful of sites the elevation is missing altogether, so there is a box to override it. Leave it empty to use the reported figure — the key never quietly assumes sea level, and says NEED ELEV/QNH instead if it genuinely cannot work it out.

Color

Amber above 3,000ft and red above 6,000ft. That is the rule of thumb taught for a normally‑aspirated light aircraft, and it is a prompt to run the numbers, not a verdict. There is no universal "too high": it depends on your aircraft, your weight and your runway.

Humidity

Deliberately excluded, as it is from every standard cockpit method and from the charts in your POH. That keeps this number in agreement with the one you would work out on an E6B, which matters more here than a few tens of feet of theoretical precision.

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Nearest VFR

Where can I actually fly today?

The key finds every reporting airfield within your chosen radius and shows the nearest one that is VFR, with its distance and bearing. Press to page through the next four. Leave the airport box empty and it searches around your own position instead — the same one the radar uses.

What counts as flyable

Only airfields that actually file a report are searched, and a station with no flight category is treated as unknown, never as VFR. About one reporting site in ten sends temperature and wind but no cloud or visibility; counting those as flyable would point you at a field whose conditions nobody knows. A small strip with no METAR will not appear here even if the weather over it is beautiful.

MVFR is off by default. It is a different decision from VFR and only you know your personal minimums — switch it on in the key's settings and the category of each field is still shown.

NONE VFR IN 100NM

The search ran and found nothing. That is a real answer about the radius you asked for. If the search itself could not run you will see the reason instead (TIMEOUT, NO DNS) — never a false "nowhere to go".

This describes the airfields, not the route to them. The weather between you and a VFR field fifty miles away is a separate question, and one only a briefing can answer.

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Track Flight

One key, one flight number.

Enter a flight number as it is printed on a boarding pass (AA3547) or an ATC callsign (AAL3547) — both work. The key pages through the route and how far along it is, the aircraft, an arrival estimate, and the weather at the destination.

What it can and cannot tell you

It works from live position data broadcast by the aircraft itself, so it can show you where a flight is, how fast, how high and roughly when it will arrive. It cannot show you the gate, the terminal, the scheduled time, the delay in minutes, or "Boarding" and "Delayed" status — and neither can anything else without a paid subscription to airline data. No aircraft broadcasts its gate. Position comes over the radio; schedules live in airline systems and have to be bought.

It also cannot see a flight that is not airborne yet, or one out of range of the volunteer receiver network — mid‑ocean, mostly.

The arrival estimate

Great‑circle distance from the aircraft's current position at its current ground speed. It ignores the filed route, holding, descent and taxi, and it is not the airline's scheduled arrival time. If the route on file does not match where the aircraft actually is, the key says ROUTE? and prints no estimate rather than a confident wrong one.

POSITION BUSY

The free position service is rate‑limiting us, not telling us the aircraft is absent. It will resolve on the next update. This is shown separately from NOT AIRBORNE on purpose: "could not ask" and "the answer is no" are different things.

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Radar (Full Deck)

Press one key and the whole deck becomes a scope.

The key shows a live scope of the aircraft around you. Press it and the entire deck switches to a full‑size radar with a back arrow in the top‑left corner; press that to return to where you were.

Setting up

Your position is looked up from your internet connection and saved. That follows the connection, not the desk — on a VPN it will be the exit node — so there are manual latitude and longitude boxes in the settings if you need them. If the key sits on LOCATING, the lookup is being blocked and those boxes are the fix.

Does it work outside the United States?

Yes, anywhere on earth. Set your position — automatically or by typing your latitude and longitude — and the scope centers there. There is nothing US‑specific in the radar at all.

What varies is how busy your sky looks, because the aircraft positions come from a network of volunteer receivers rather than from radar stations. Checked live within 100nm of each of these:

London	347 aircraft
Frankfurt	217
Paris	123
Toronto	104
Madrid	83
São Paulo	53
Dubai	39
Warsaw	36
Mumbai	19
Tokyo	18
Sydney	17
Johannesburg	15
Auckland	2
Nairobi	2

A snapshot on one afternoon, not a league table — but the shape is real and stable: coverage is dense over Europe and North America and thinner elsewhere. If your scope looks empty, that is usually a quiet sky plus a sparse receiver network, not a fault. Widen the range to 100–250nm and you will normally find traffic.

Reading the scope

Aircraft are drawn as what they broadcast themselves to be: a chevron for an airliner, a cross for a light aircraft, a long span for a glider, a turning disc for a helicopter, a box for something on the ground. About a third of aircraft broadcast no category at all, and those get their own distinct shape — drawing them as airliners would be a confident lie about a third of the sky.

Labels are hidden below three keys wide. Five callsigns on a single 72‑pixel key is an unreadable smear, and overlapping labels are worse than none.

Range, and why the aircraft look still

This is geometry, not a fault. On a 5×3 deck at 50nm range the scope radius is about 100 pixels, so one nautical mile is two pixels and a 450‑knot airliner moves about a pixel and a half between updates. Set the range to 10–25nm if you want to see movement.

The bundled profile

The full‑deck radar is a profile the plugin installs into the Stream Deck app. Once installed, that copy belongs to you — if you rearrange it, the plugin cannot put it back, because there is no way for a plugin to edit a profile the app has already given you. If you need a clean one, email me and I will ship a build that installs a fresh copy alongside it.

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Looking an airport up officially

Flight Deck asks for a 4‑letter ICAO code, and if you do not know one — or you want the authoritative record for a field rather than what a key can fit in five characters — these are the official sources. Several are built into the Flight Bag already, so you can put them on a key with the airport filled in for you.

United States — official

FAA Airport Data & Information Portal	The FAA's own airport record: runways, lighting, services, ownership and current status. This is the source the other sites are built from. Uses the 3‑letter location identifier (DFW, not KDFW). In the Flight Bag as FAA APT.
FAA Chart Supplement	The digital Chart Supplement (formerly the A/FD) — the official published entry for every US airport, updated every 28 days.
Leidos Flight Service	Official briefing and flight plan filing. This is the approved source Flight Deck is not. In the Flight Bag as BRIEF.

Outside the United States — official

There is no single worldwide airport authority. Every country publishes its own Aeronautical Information Publication, and that AIP is the official record for its airports — the same reason there is no world NOTAM office.

EUROCONTROL EAD Basic	The index of official national AIPs for Europe and well beyond it. Free registration. In the Flight Bag as WORLD AIP.
UK AIP (NATS)	The official UK publication.
NAV CANADA	Canada Flight Supplement and official planning.
Airservices Australia AIP	The official Australian publication.

Useful, but not official

These are third‑party and they are very good — most pilots open them first. They are aggregations of government data, so if one ever disagrees with the official record above, the official record wins.

AirNav	US airport detail and fuel prices. In the Flight Bag as A/FD.
SkyVector	Worldwide airport and chart lookup. In the Flight Bag as CHARTS and WORLD MAP.
OurAirports	Every field in the world, community‑maintained and public domain. Good for finding an ICAO code you do not know. In the Flight Bag as AIRPORT.

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Feet, flight level or meters — and knots, mph or km/h

Tap the ALT key on the flight dashboard to cycle flight level → feet → meters. Tap the SPEED key to cycle knots → mph → km/h. Both are also in the settings panel of any Flight Deck key. The choice is global — set it once, anywhere, and every key that shows an altitude or a speed follows.

FL360 and 36000FT are the same altitude. A flight level is simply hundreds of feet, so FL360 means 36,000 ft. It is how pilots and air traffic control say it above 18,000 ft, and it is what your altimeter reads up there; consumer flight trackers such as FlightRadar24 show plain feet instead. Neither is wrong — they are two ways of writing one number. If you are comparing the deck against a tracker on your phone, put it in feet and they will agree exactly.

Below 18,000 ft the altitude always reads in feet even in flight‑level mode, because down there an aircraft is reporting an altitude rather than a flight level, and FL035 for something at 3,500 ft would be wrong rather than merely unfamiliar.

Distance to run stays in nautical miles. That is deliberate: the nautical mile is the unit in every cockpit and on every flight plan in the world, including in countries that are metric for everything else, so converting it would make the key less useful rather than more.

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Color‑blind mode

The standard flight‑category convention puts VFR green against IFR red — the exact pair that around one man in twelve cannot tell apart. Switch on Color‑blind mode in any Flight Deck key's settings and the whole plugin moves to a palette chosen so that all four categories stay distinguishable under every common form of color blindness. It also separates your own position from an emergency squawk on the radar, which are otherwise two shades of the same amber.

The setting is global — set it once, anywhere, and every key follows. And in both modes the category is always spelled out on the key: the color has never been the only clue.

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What the plugin sends, and where

There is no account, no sign‑up and no API key anywhere in this plugin, and nothing is sent to Kralicek Customs. The plugin talks directly to three public services and to nobody else:

• aviationweather.gov (NOAA/FAA) — the airport codes you ask about, for weather.
• adsbdb.com and adsb.lol / adsb.fi — flight numbers you ask about, and a latitude/longitude for the radar.
• ipwho.is — once, to work out roughly where you are for the radar, unless you have typed your position in yourself.

Your settings stay on your own machine, in the Stream Deck app.

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Stuck in a full-deck view? Hold any key

This exists because of a real limitation, and it is worth explaining rather than hiding.

The three full-deck views are Stream Deck profiles. When you first press one of those keys, the Stream Deck app installs a profile and that copy becomes yours — you can rearrange it, and you can delete keys from it, including the Back key in the top-left corner. Delete that one and the obvious way out is gone.

The plugin cannot stop you, and it cannot put it back. Every profile it ships is marked read‑only, and the Stream Deck app allows editing anyway. Once a profile is installed there is no way for a plugin to repair, replace or delete it — the only thing the software can do with a profile is switch to one. That is a platform limit, not an oversight.

So the way out was made impossible to delete instead: it is not a key, it is a gesture, and it works on every key in the view.

Putting the layout back the way it was

If you have rearranged or deleted keys and want the original layout again:

1. Hold any key to get out of the view.
2. In the Stream Deck app, open the profile list and delete the profile — it will be called Flight Radar, Nearest VFR or Flight Deck Tracker.
3. Press the corresponding key on your deck again.

Because the app installs a bundled profile the first time the plugin asks to switch to one, removing it should make the next press install a fresh copy. ⚠ I have not been able to test that particular sequence, so it is the route to try rather than a promise. If it does not work, email me and I will ship a build that installs the layout under a new name, which definitely does.

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If something is not working

TIMEOUT NO DNS REFUSED DROPPED	A network problem, named as precisely as the plugin can name it. These are usually brief; the key retries on its own.
TLS	An encrypted connection was rejected. This is almost always antivirus or security software intercepting HTTPS — the plugin runs on Node, which uses its own certificate list rather than Windows'. Browsers can work perfectly while this fails.
RATE POSITION BUSY	A free public service is throttling us. It clears on its own.
LOCATING	The plugin does not know where you are yet. If it stays, type your latitude and longitude into the radar settings.
NO REPORT	That airfield does not file a weather report. Not an error.
A dim, gray key	The observation is more than ninety minutes old. The key is telling you it has nothing current.

If a key is stuck, the plugin writes a detailed log. On Windows it is in %APPDATA%\Elgato\StreamDeck\Plugins\com.kralicekcustoms.flightboard.sdPlugin\logs\; on macOS, ~/Library/Application Support/com.elgato.StreamDeck/Plugins/ and the same path from there. Send me that file and I can usually tell you exactly what went wrong. Copy it out before uninstalling — it is deleted with the plugin.

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Requirements

Stream Deck app 6.9 or newer, on Windows 10 or later or macOS 12 or later. Works on the Stream Deck MK.2, XL, Mini, Plus and Neo; the full‑deck radar profile is built for each of them. An internet connection is needed for everything except the sunrise and sunset times, which are calculated on your own machine.

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Languages

The plugin's menus, action names and settings are translated into German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese.

The aviation codes on the keys are not translated, and that is deliberate. METAR, TAF, VFR, IFR, BKN018, ICAO identifiers and callsigns are international standards used in exactly this form by pilots in every country. ForeFlight, SkyDemon and Jeppesen leave them alone for the same reason: translating them would make the product wrong rather than friendlier.

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Where the data comes from

• Weather — METAR and TAF from the NOAA/FAA Aviation Weather Center. A work of the US government: public domain, worldwide.
• Aircraft positions — adsb.lol and adsb.fi, community networks of volunteer receivers, used under ODbL 1.0.
• Flight numbers, routes and aircraft — adsbdb.com and the adsb.lol standing-data set. Route data is the work of David Taylor and Jim Mason and is displayed here by query only; it is not copied into any database of ours. Two sources are consulted because one is not enough: a flight number is reused for the return leg, so a single database often has the route filed in the opposite direction, and the two do not always agree. The aircraft’s own track and position decide which one is right.
• Approximate location — ipwho.is.

Not affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by Elgato, the FAA, NOAA, or any airline or airport. Stream Deck is a product of Elgato.

Questions

Email [email protected]. If a key is misbehaving, the log file described above turns a guessing game into a five‑minute answer.

This page is not listed in the site navigation or in search results — it is linked from inside the plugin. It is not private, though: anyone with the address can read it, and there is nothing here that needs to be secret.

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