Global flight paths in pictures | Hacker News Reader

Global flight paths in pictures

bbc.co.uk

57 pointssp817 comments

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/ but it's not clear if that data is 'just' lines between destinations or the actual waypoints of the planes.

It 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

[1] http://www.flightradar24.com/2013-05-24/13:06/PIA709

Optimal 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_0...

There 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

Very similar to Aaron Koblin's work visualising the same thing from 2005: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/

I 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.

And both very similar to that Facebook friendship visualisation few years ago.

Find it interesting that the flight paths naturally show outlines of the continents.

We find places near water more desirable, especially coastlines. A lot of big cities are on coastlines

I 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.

Places near water tend to have milder climates which humans definitely find desirable.

Go to newairplane.com and click "flight tracker" for some awesome animated visualizations by Boeing

Hmmm more flight paths to Hawaii than to any of southern Africa (or so it seems)

To 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.

data comes from http://openflights.org/

Looks like a bird over Europe

Oh yeah, so it does. Order from chaos!!!

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