The alternatives
There are several ways to put aircraft in a room.
Most of them are good, and some are cheaper than this one. Here is an honest account of what else exists and where each thing wins, so you can decide before you leave an address.
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The field
Five different answers to the same question, and they are not really competing with each other.
E-ink frames. FlightPortrait is the notable one: a battery-powered 13.3 inch colour e-ink frame that renders the aircraft over your house as a vintage airline poster. US$499, delivering in the first half of 2027, and the device protocol is open source so a frame can be pointed at your own server. It refreshes on the order of twice a day, which is what lets it run for months on a charge. It is a lovely object.
LED panels. NearestPlane at £124.99 and TheFlightWall are bright, small, always on, and read from across a room. They show the flights near you as text and colour rather than as a picture. No subscription on either.
Desk displays. FlightAbove is hand-built in the UK, in several sizes, with one version that plugs into an HDMI screen and a browser app you can run on hardware you already own. Of everything here it is the closest in shape to Airborne, and it is aimed squarely at a desk.
An app on a spare tablet. Skyty Wall turns an old iPad, iPhone or Mac into a flight board for a one-off €4.99: the aircraft near you as rows of text, in a dot-matrix, split-flap or plain style, refreshed every eight seconds from the same community feed Airborne can use. If you have the tablet, it is the cheapest thing on this page by a distance. planes.fyi does a similar job free in a browser, and suggests pointing a projector at the ceiling.
Build it yourself. A Raspberry Pi, a receiver and PiAware or tar1090 gets you a live map for the price of the parts, and there are open source dot-matrix builds, Colin Waddell's FlightTracker among them, that show the nearest flight on an LED panel. It is the cheapest way in, and what you get is a tracking map or a line of text rather than something you would hang up.
Side by side
The honest table.
| Airborne | E-ink frame | LED panel | App on a tablet | Build your own | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How big | Whatever screen you point it at, up to a television | 13.3 inches, supplied | About a paperback, supplied | The tablet you have | Whatever you have |
| What you see | The operator's own livery on that airframe, drawn | A poster-style print | Text and colour | Rows of text, styled | Usually a map |
| Views | Five: print, map, scope, movements board, hangar record | The print | A flight list | A flight list, three styles | Usually a map |
| Refresh | Every 30 seconds | About twice a day | Seconds | Seconds | Seconds |
| Reads at | Across a room | Arm's length | Across a room | Tablet-sized | Depends |
| Several screens, one site | Yes, each watching somewhere different | One frame each | One panel each | One tablet each | Possible, and fiddly |
| Your own aerial | Optional, and supported | Not applicable | Not applicable | Not applicable | Required |
| Setting up | Plug in and follow the screen. Nothing to download | Plug in | Plug in | Install the app | An afternoon, then upkeep |
| Power | A socket nearby | Battery, charged a few times a year | A socket nearby | The tablet's own, on charge | A socket nearby |
| Roughly | £249 for the player. Use a screen you have, or add one for £200 | US$499, frame included | £125 and up, panel included | €4.99 once, plus the tablet | Cost of parts |
Figures for other products come from their own published material, checked in September 2026. They are other people's products and we may have something out of date; tell us and we will correct it. Nothing here is a criticism of any of them, and two of them are things we would happily own.
Where we differ
Three things nobody else is doing.
A room, not a desk
Everything above is built for one person at a desk or one frame in a hallway. Airborne is built for a room: a screen a lounge reads from ten feet away, with several of them on one site each watching somewhere different.
It wants a socket. Most people stand the screen on a sideboard or a shelf with the player tucked behind it, the way a digital picture frame usually ends up. It will hang on a wall as happily, if there is power where you want it.
Five views, not one
The art print is one of five. There is also a radar map, a phosphor scope, an airport movements board and a record of every airframe you have ever seen, and they run on any screen with an HDMI input rather than on a panel we sell you.
And it redraws every thirty seconds, which matters in a lounge and matters much less in a hallway.
It keeps growing
Over eight hundred liveries today and more every day, with special schemes and retro liveries drawn as we find them. New artwork arrives on a display that is already on a wall, without anybody doing anything to it.
A frame you buy is the frame you have. This gets better after you have paid for it, which is the part a one-off price makes easy to forget.
Which to choose
Buy something else if
You want a battery-powered object with no cable, something small enough for a desk, a tracking map rather than a picture, or a list of flights on an iPad you already own for the price of a coffee. Those are all good reasons and there are good products for each.
Airborne suits you if
You want something a room can read, changing every thirty seconds, at whatever size the wall or the sideboard allows. Or you want more than one, watching more than one sky.