Live runway video from LaGuardia, Maho Beach and ten more airports

At 13:11 UTC on 2026-10-04 a SunExpress jet sat on stand at Düsseldorf with the control tower on the skyline behind it and the yellow marker for taxiway B18 in the near foreground. I have that frame because the camera hands out real video to anything that asks: 1000eyes puts the HLS source on its own player page in plain text, 800x450, no login and no embed.

Nearly everything we carry is a still image that gets replaced every few minutes, and for a mountain pass that is the right shape. An airport is the exception. The interesting part of an airport is a twenty-second event, the flare and the touchdown, and a camera that refreshes every 300 seconds will show you an empty runway almost every time you look. So this is about the airport cameras that are continuous video. The airport category listed 6,662 live cameras when I loaded it at 13:12 UTC today, of every kind. Twelve of those are video, and I confirmed each one was streaming while I wrote this.

The twelve that were running this afternoon

• LaGuardia looks across Flushing Bay at runways 13 and 31 with Midtown stacked up behind them. The operator's own notes name the hardware, which is the part I like: an AXIS Q6225-LE PTZ running CamStreamer's PlaneTracker, swinging the lens onto whatever Flightradar24's ADS-B feed says is on approach and printing the registration and the route into the corner of the picture. Unbroken since 2026-07-02 at 18:13 UTC.
• Princess Juliana at Maho Beach is the runway 10 approach, the one everyone has seen a clip of, except that this is the clip running all day. Same PlaneTracker rig on an AXIS Q6318-LE, and the stream page says aircraft cross the beach at a few metres. Live since 2025-12-17 at 15:47 UTC.
• Midway is in 4K from the southeast corner of runways 31L, 31C and 31R, hosted on the roof of a garage whose owner, by StreamTime's account, simply likes aeroplanes. Three parallels in one frame is rare. Running since 2025-08-09 at 18:41 UTC.
• Las Vegas covers 26R and 26L with the Strip along the back of the shot, on an AXIS Q6358-LE, live since 2026-07-10 at 21:44 UTC.
• Lanzarote sits on a panorama of the apron, the terminals and the tower, and turns to the runway by itself when it picks up an aircraft. It has been broadcasting without a break since 2023-03-20 at 19:26 UTC, three and a half years, which beats the next longest here by about eighteen months.
• Tahiti Faa'a runs on ipcamlive instead of YouTube, so you can pull a frame straight out of it. The player hands over a stream id, and the snapshot path under it came back at 01:07 UTC on 2026-10-08 stamped 15:00:22 on 2026-10-07: a widebody on the terminal stand, the car park behind it full, the lagoon and the reef line across the back of the shot. Ten hours behind UTC, which you can read straight off those two numbers, so the island's flying day opens as Europe's is closing. That stream id rotates, so read it out of the player rather than bookmarking the frame.
• Wellington has been up since 2024-09-14 at 13:31 UTC. Camview NZ say on the stream itself that this camera's dome has worn, and that a newer 4K unit on the same hill is at camview.nz, so a soft picture is the glass and not your connection.
• Narita runway A, south end is the Asahi Shimbun's, from its bureau inside the airport, and it leaves the recording scrubbable. Drag the bar back and you can find the movement you missed, which no other camera in this list will let you do. The bureau also runs a second camera at the middle of the same runway from stand 26 and suggests putting the two windows side by side. Live since 2025-10-19 at 09:18 UTC.
• Haneda terminal 1 is TBS's, pointed at the terminal rather than the runway, so it is not a spotting camera at all. It is the one to open during a typhoon warning, which is exactly what the channel tags it for. Live since 2025-03-31 at 09:52 UTC.
• Naha and Senagajima is shot from the terrace of a steak restaurant on the island, ten minutes from the airport, looking over the water at the approach to the second runway. The owner's description promises sunsets and an occasional fire pit in the foreground. Live since 2025-05-24 at 05:30 UTC.
• Hamburg and Düsseldorf are the two you can fetch directly, through 1000eyes rather than a video platform. Hamburg's is the feed the airport itself calls Vorfeld Nord, looking down the pier at the stands and the airbridges, with a tug crossing the apron when I pulled a frame at 13:11 UTC on 2026-10-04, and it is one of four on that page alongside Vorfeld Süd and the two terminals. Both are apron views rather than the runway their names suggest, and that is better than it sounds, because pushback and turnaround is where an airport spends its actual day.

Two numbers a video stream publishes and a still does not

A still camera has one honest figure, which is how often the frame changes. A stream has two, and both are sitting in the open.

The first is how far behind real time the picture is, which a publisher will sometimes just tell you. Hamburg Airport does: for security reasons its webcam pictures are shown on a 15 minute delay, so the aircraft you are watching push back on the apron left the stand a quarter of an hour ago. Worth knowing before you try to match something on screen against a flight tracker. Neither German feed runs through the night, either, which I found out the slow way: at 01:20 UTC on 2026-10-05 the Wowza origin answered 404 to the Düsseldorf manifest and to all four of Hamburg's, having served Düsseldorf a clean 800x450 twelve hours before that.

The second is how long the thing has been up. Every stream above publishes a broadcast start, and the spread is wide: Lanzarote at three and a half years, LaGuardia at three months. A camera that has held a single unbroken broadcast since March 2023 is telling you something about the people running it that no uptime badge of ours could.

Three things that look live and are not

I checked each of these today rather than trusting the label, and the checking turned up three ways an airport stream can say live and not be.

One is a stream that is not a camera. "Live ADS-B Data and ATC at LAX" is a handsome thing and it is honest about itself in its own title: it is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 with PSXT, driven by real ADS-B and layered over real tower audio. Real traffic, rendered aircraft.

Another is a loop. Airplane Live's JFK stream is marked live, has been live since 2026-01-19, and is captioned "RE-Live New York Planespotting with Highlights". It is a rebroadcast of the good bits, which is a perfectly nice thing to watch and is not the airport now.

The third is an empty player. Airlive's Los Angeles page still loads its ipcamlive shell, and the shell comes back with streamid = '', which is a player politely holding a space where a stream used to be.

So the test, if you are hunting for these yourself: read the title for the word "re-live", ask the player for its broadcast details rather than reading the badge, and open the manifest if there is one. Three requests, and you know.

What happens next here

The liveness test I used this afternoon is one HTTP request per stream, which is cheap enough to run nightly against every feed we hold that resolves to a video platform, and getting it into the nightly check is the next job on my own list. After that I want the same for the direct HLS ones, where the manifest answers the question even faster.

What I cannot work out yet is the other half of the latency. Hamburg states its quarter of an hour outright, and that is the only published figure in the whole list. The nine on YouTube do not publish anything equivalent that I can find, and a low-latency live stream there can be anywhere from two seconds to half a minute behind, which matters if you are watching a camera against a flight tracker and trying to match an aircraft to its tail number. If there is a way to read that out of a public endpoint, I would like to know it.