3 ms·
I'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 At
by joosters 13y ago
I'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