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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.