Ashes no crashes – Watch live online as aircraft clear from the UK's ash-filled skies

In case you hadn’t heard, Iceland’s volcanoes are sending tonnes of volcanic ash towards the UK right now. Yeah, so that’s not the tech story. The tech story is that courtesy of FlightRadar24 you can watch as the skies across the UK clear of aircraft.

FlightRadar24 receives information from several ADS-B receivers in real time. This is presented as airplanes on a Google-map.

You can even click on a plane and see its path and flight status, like height.

Launched in Sweden in 2007, Flightradar24’s network of hackers and geeks who have an ADS-B receiver has grown to over 100 ADS-B receivers. They receive the information from airplanes with ADS-B and send this information to a server, which then plots it on the map. Only airplanes within the coverage area of the 100 receivers are visible.

BTW, any suggestion that Iceland, an island which helped the global financial crisis kick off by creating an unsustanable banking industry, is having its revenge on the UK, which insisted it pay back the cash, is pure satire.

UPDATE: Two hours later this is what it looked like (is that a Ryan Air Plane? it was. Probably charging for landing):

UPDATE2: Here’s an image of how planes are disappearing from the Atlantic