Commercial Air Traffic Seen Around the World

Posted by Nathan / Oct 8, 2008 to Mapping / 13 comments

This computer simulation by Zhaw shows worldwide commercial flights over a 24-hour period. It's been making the blog rounds lately. Watch as flights start in the morning in the western hemisphere, and as the sun starts to come up in the east, more flights begin in the east. I'm not sure if we're seeing actual GPS traces or just interpolated flight paths from point-to-point data, but my guess is the latter. Does anyone understand the language on Zhaw?

[via Gizmodo | Thanks, Greg and Max]

Like what you see? Subscribe to the FlowingData RSS feed to stay updated on what's new in data visualization.

    What now?

  • Subscribe to FlowingData Feed
  • Leave a comment

Comments

  • Martin
    Oct 8, 2008, 1:54 pm

    Nathan,

    the language is German; ZHAW is the Zurich University of Applied Sciences.

  • Nathan
    Oct 8, 2008, 1:58 pm

    @Martin - thanks :) do you understand German? I’m interested in how they built the simulation and where the data come from.

  • Kevin Carlson
    Oct 8, 2008, 2:52 pm

    Check this out…

    http://translate.google.com/tr.....&tl=en

  • Nathan
    Oct 8, 2008, 5:23 pm

    @Kevin - ah, thanks. that didn’t work when i tried it last week. so it looks like they have actual GPS data from planes in real-time. That’s A LOT of data

  • Gerd
    Oct 9, 2008, 1:44 am

    Unfortunately the page you are linking to, seems not to describe the current video (i’m also a native german speaker). but rather flights local to zurich using their own trasponder hardware.

    As the logos in the video suggest this video is a cooperation between zhaw and flightstats (www.flightstats.com) using flightstats data.

  • Thomas
    Oct 9, 2008, 5:01 am

    This Animation was produced by ZHAW to be shown on a real 3D digital globe currently beeing shown in Technorama - The Swiss Science Center. The Data comes from flightstats.com and is NOT live, but rather from the regular daily departure/arrival times of all civil flight airports in the world. The routes then are being interpolated (shortest route between two points on a sphere). Even though this is not exactly accurate on a small scale, it’s fairly accurate on a global scale. Some numbers: Starting from over 9′000 airports there are over 90′000 flights every day, every time there are between 8′000 and 13′000 airplanes simultaneously in the air…Search for air traffic worldwide on vimeo and you’ll find a 720p HD-version of this (or even 1080p for downloading)…

  • Nathan
    Oct 9, 2008, 12:41 pm

    @Thomas - thanks, that clears up a lot. Are there any videos of the 3D digital globe?

« Previous Post Next Post »