One of my favorite things to do while flying is to closely review the airline's flight maps (the maps in the back of inflight magazines that show the routes the airline flies). I like looking at the patterns of the flights and how the routes are mapped. And I especially enjoy thinking about the possibilities.
Along the same lines, via Geo, is a link the work of Aaron Koblin at UCLA:
If I am understanding this correctly… Aaron has taken flight data from the FAA and parsed it through a computer (please excuse any incorrect uses of computer terms) to create this exciting and visualizations of flight patterns and routes across the US.
He has created several different types of visualizations that represent the flight patterns and created several movies.
I suggest this movie, video documentation, which has music and seems to sort of "summarize" the different visualization types.
Resources
Filed under Maps, Other Resources, Transit and Transportation with 2 Comments
|2 Responses to “Flight Patterns: Computer Generated Visualizations by Aaron Koblin”
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October 25th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Yeah, flight plans are cool. Unfortunately, those maps you see in the airline magazines are not necessarily accurate. I was perusing one recently and saw a footnote reading something like this: "Depicted flight paths do not reflect actual flight paths". I'm not sure if this means (a) there are slight deviations from the posted paths, or (b) the depicteds paths take a lot of artistic license.
Hmmm… how can we find out the truth!?!?
–Steve
November 13th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
There are a number of reasons why a map may not accurately reflect an actual flight plan. Remember that the map depicts a "perfect" Great Circle route between Point A and Point B. Why do aircraft deviate? Foremost among the reasons is weather. Aircraft, especially passenger flights, do not fly through storms; they fly around them. The presence of clear-air turbulence can also alter the flight path depending upon its severity. Other factors might also include congestion in and around other airports, or a change in wind direction that would require the pilot to steer the plane into a new landing pattern. (Passenger aircract begin their landing approach hundreds of miles away from their destination in order to provide passengers with the greatest level of comfort, e.g. shallow glidescope, large turning radii, etc.)