4 ms·
Global flight paths in pictures
- victorology 13y agoFind it interesting that the flight paths naturally show outlines of the continents.
- vlasev 13y agoWe find places near water more desirable, especially coastlines. A lot of big cities are on coastlines
- claudius 13y agoI wouldn’t say more desirable, but definitely more accessible, especially during the times when most modern cities were founded or developed a special position among similarly sized villages and ships (either ocean-going or river boats) were the most natural means of transporting goods.
- khuey 13y agoPlaces near water tend to have milder climates which humans definitely find desirable.
- yread 13y agodata comes from http://openflights.org/ http://openflights.org/
- joosters 13y agoI'm curious about one thing: Are these the actual flight paths of planes, or are they lines drawn between destinations? e.g. I thought that flights over the Atlantic travel via different routes depending on whether they are going east or west, to take advantage of the prevailing winds. Or maybe they just alter their height? Does anyone know? A quick bit of web searching doesn't seem to give the answer to the data on these pictures; apparently they are from http://openflights.org/ http://openflights.org/ but it's not clear if that data is 'just' lines between destinations or the actual waypoints of the planes.
- claudius 13y agoIt looks more like shortest paths between airports. Actual flight paths of actual planes can be found at [0], e.g. [1], the path of the recently redirected Pakistan International flight. [0] http://www.flightradar24.com http://www.flightradar24.com [1] http://www.flightradar24.com/2013-05-24/13:06/PIA709 http://www.flightradar24.com/2013-05-24/13:06/PIA709
- draugadrotten 13y agoOptimal flight paths can deviate significantly from the shortest path, as can be seen in this Boeing paper. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_03_09/article_08_1.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_0...
- smackfu 13y agoThere are a limited number of "tracks" that planes follow, but the details vary from day to day due to weather, and wouldn't show up on a aggregate visualization very well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks
- tommyd 13y agoVery similar to Aaron Koblin's work visualising the same thing from 2005: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/ http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/
- croisillon 13y agoAnd both very similar to that Facebook friendship visualisation few years ago.
- jschulenklopper 13y agoI thought the same thing. The big advantage of Aaron's work is that it mapped actual plane positions during flight instead of the (theoretical) straight path between two airports. If you zoom in at one of Aaron's visualizations - especially close to an airport - you can see the redirects, loops and alternative approaches that the air traffic controllers directed planes to.
- Myrth 13y agoLooks like a bird over Europe
- alan_cx 13y agoOh yeah, so it does. Order from chaos!!!
- savrajsingh 13y agoGo to newairplane.com and click "flight tracker" for some awesome animated visualizations by Boeing
- lettergram 13y agoHmmm more flight paths to Hawaii than to any of southern Africa (or so it seems)
- notahacker 13y agoTo some extent that's true, but the crowdsourced data probably exaggerates it (I suspect American leisure travellers are more likely to submit their flight details to an open source flight tracking project than Angolan businessmen). London to South African routes operated by multiple carriers are conspicuously missing.