Without a key the map falls back to NASA EONET, which only lists curated
wildfires over ~500 acres and covers much of Asia thinly. FIRMS is the raw satellite
detection feed — every hotspot, everywhere.
Basemap: CARTO began watermarking keyless tiles in Aug 2026, so the default is now Esri's
keyless dark canvas. Append ?carto=YOURKEY to the URL to go back to CARTO.
T+0mlaunching…
AUDIO
Everything is synthesised in the browser with the Web Audio API — no files to load. Settings are remembered.
loading feeds…
FIRST/STRIKE
Almost every catastrophic wildfire was once a small fire. Satellites already spot new fires within minutes — but the aircraft that could put them out often sit unused at nearby airfields, because nothing connects the two. This screen is a working sketch of that missing connection.
1 · DETECT
NASA's VIIRS and MODIS satellites detect active fire worldwide, everywhere, every day. With a free FIRMS key this map plots all of them — not just the big named incidents — grouped into fire complexes.
2 · DISPATCH
For each fire, we find the closest airfield in a demo network (pink dots) and calculate how fast a firefighting aircraft could be over the flames.
3 · CONTAIN
Hit a fire in its first hour and a single small aircraft can often stop it. Miss that window and it can take armies, weeks, and billions of dollars.
How to read it: each fire has a live clock — T+time since detection. Green means the first-hour window is still open. Click a fire, then press SIMULATE LAUNCH to watch the response flight that could have happened. The buttons on the left are levers: satellite view, 3D terrain, globe, real aircraft flying right now, animated wind, live news. New in 0.7: an orbital HUD — targeting reticle, heading tape, radar, flight telemetry, a mission log — and a cinema camera that rides along with the lead aircraft and orbits the fire once it's on scene. Grab the map at any time to take the stick. In 0.8 each fire carries a TRIAGE call — people at risk, whether the land is fire-adapted, fire weather, intensity — so you can decide which ones are worth an aircraft and which should be left to burn. And FLY THE SORTIE puts you in the cockpit: real terrain, real imagery, real wind, your choice of tanker, fighter or drone swarm, and a drop you can miss. The INSIGHTS tab charts where the world is burning — and where fires burn far from any help. New in 0.5: every simulated response deploys a Magic Carpet suppression pod and bills a shared $100M defense budget (top right) — fight fires and watch what containment really costs, and how the bill grows the longer a fire burns. New in 0.9: ORBIT CAM (drag to rotate and tilt, scroll to zoom), a parallax star field that swings behind the globe as you fly it, a GYRO button in the cockpit so you can tilt your phone to fly the sortie, synthesised AUDIO, a RETURN TO DISPATCH button that snaps you back to where you were before a response, and the app now remembers your camera, the fires you've looked at and the ones you've paid to contain.
Demonstration only: the airfields, response times, launch simulation, triage calls, and “containment window” thresholds are illustrative assumptions, not operational data. Fire locations, detection times, imagery, and aircraft positions are real, via NASA FIRMS / EONET and public ADS-B feeds. Fire complexes are clustered from raw 375 m satellite detections and are not official incidents; place names are the nearest airfield, not a geocode.