

Global flight paths in pictures - sp8
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-22657086

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joosters
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.

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claudius
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>

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draugadrotten
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...](http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_03_09/article_08_1.html)

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

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jschulenklopper
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.

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

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

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claudius
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.

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

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

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

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notahacker
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.

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yread
data comes from <http://openflights.org/>

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Myrth
Looks like a bird over Europe

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

