
World Airports Voronoi - morgante
https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/voronoi/airports/
======
slake
This is really cool. If I remember right international passenger flight
regulations insist that there be atleast one airport that can handle your
class of aircraft within 180 minutes of flying time at one engine operative
speeds at all times. If we assume a passenger jet flies at roughly 0.8 Mach or
~960 kph, and one-engine operative speed is roughly 40% of that or ~384 KPH.
That means an airport needs to be within a circle of radius 1152 kms. That's
an area of ~4.16M km-squared. Simplifying that all airports can handle all
passenger jets, not one of those voronoi cells can have an area greater than
4.16M km-squared.

Is there an easy way to calculate the area of each cell?

Did I mention this is really cool!!

~~~
oostevo
The regulations you're thinking of are ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine
Operational Performance Standards or, alternatively, Engines Turn or
Passengers Swim).

~~~
slake
Lol! Engines Turn or Passengers Swim! Excellent.

------
golergka
This runs slower on my computer than MGSV in ultra settings running on 4k
resolution.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Completely unusable on my iPad Air. Damn.

It's amazing how fast computers are. And it's amazing how slow we make them
with layers and layers of cruft built atop more layers and layers of cruft.

~~~
nilkn
The difference is that all you have to do to view this is punch a URL into a
browser, on virtually any computer in any form factor, and it's on your screen
instantly with absolutely zero setup. Of course there's a performance cost to
this incredible convenience.

Imagine if the author had instead used, say, DirectX and C++ and only bothered
compiling it for his own platform. Not only would it be nearly impossible for
this to have reached the same audience so quickly, but it likely would have
taken the author longer to make as well because JavaScript + D3.js are
uniquely suited towards rapidly making these sorts of prototypes.

------
teraflop
Pretty soon there's going to be a nice big new polygon added in the middle of
the South Atlantic:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena_Airport)

~~~
Xophmeister
Looking at the map, I am liking some of the place names on St. Helena; "The
Gates of Chaos" is a particular favourite.

~~~
Arnt
Something tells me you'll like the noun the inhabitants use for themselves.
Hint: They don't call themselves "helens".

------
idlewords
What a cool project! This is very fun to play with in conjunction with the
ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) settings on the Great Circle Mapper.
[http://www.gcmap.com](http://www.gcmap.com)

Among other things it drives home how remote the waters MH370 disappeared in
are.

~~~
minimax
I recently did ORD-HKG and spent quite a lot of time thinking about ETOPS
diversion airports over Siberia (because honestly what else are you gonna do).
Now I'm wondering if you can even land a fully laden 777 at any of them. Most
of them don't even seem to have wikipedia pages.

~~~
lucaspiller
A few years ago I flew to the north of Sweden in January and as expected the
ground was covered in snow. What surprised me was that the runway wasn't
cleared - we actually landed on the snow. This was in a Boeing 737 so not
exactly a small aircraft.

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phkahler
Two comments.

1) This appears to be only airports that offer commercial passenger service.

2) Easter Island has an airport! I was under the impression you could only get
there by boat.

~~~
dalke
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Down)
.

The upgrade of the runway to support the Shuttle started in May 1986
([https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19860423&id=bn0zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=aTIHAAAAIBAJ&pg=6565,6718694&hl=en)
) and ended by August 1987
([https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=Y...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19870817&id=YPNYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=H48DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4240,4618788&hl=en)
).

~~~
toomuchtodo
"In addition, astronauts now carry passports and other documents, including
traveller's cheques, in case of emergency landings."

~~~
mightybyte
Given the high cost of every pound when launching things into space this seems
at first glance to be a pretty lousy idea. It seems to me solving this problem
through diplomatic channels would be a much better plan given the fairly low
probability of this event.

~~~
mikeash
Space shuttle cargo was something like $20,000/pound. If each astronaut needs
a pound of paperwork for contingencies (which seems like a vast overestimate)
then that's $20,000 each, which is tiny. And the marginal cost per pound was
small. Given that you're doing a launch anyway, you're probably not exactly at
the mass limit, so a few extra pounds of paperwork costs almost nothing.

------
trose
There's definitely a handful of airports in Antarctica. Are they not
"official"?

~~~
tacticus
Well they certainly have iata codes and serve larger aircraft than places like
albany wa.

Wilkins supports normal commercial aircraft like the a319

------
msrpotus
Curious if there's any region smaller than that of LaGuardia Airport. A glance
doesn't find any.

~~~
dublinben
London City is probably smaller.

------
13hours
As a South African, I never realised we have a few airports that are actually
the closest to a large part of the Antarctic coast. I know there are flights
from Chile and New Zealand to Antarctica, but none that I'm aware of from
South Africa.

------
Kenji
I thought that a voronoi partition is not possible with only straight lines on
a non-euclidean space like that; this leaves me confused.

~~~
rspeer
The edges are segments of great circles, which are the reasonable equivalent
to a straight line on the surface of a sphere.

~~~
teraflop
Or another way to look at it: if you model the earth as a perfect sphere,
there's a one-to-one monotonic relationship between geodesic distance and
distance in a straight line _through_ the earth. Points that are equidistant
by one metric are also equidistant by the other.

So you could get exactly the same diagram by finding the 3D Voronoi diagram of
the airports as a collection of points in space, and then taking the
intersection of that with the geoid.

------
exupero
It looks like the furthest point from any airport is (not surprisingly) about
the same place as Point Nemo
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceani...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_of_inaccessibility#Oceanic_pole_of_inaccessibility)),
the furthest point from land.

------
lkrubner
Off-topic, but if you want to see a great talk about working with Voronoi in
Clojure, watch this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr-
Wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=627&v=hzLAX_pr-Wc)

------
jzawodn
Hm, appears to be missing a lot of smaller airports in the USA. My home
airport (E45) in particular. I'm guessing it's only using airports that have
commercial air carrier service of some sort.

~~~
jpatokal
They're using OurAirports data, filtered to exclude all but "large" and
"medium" airports. Anything smaller than that includes all sorts of cruft like
African bush landing strips, heliports, etc.

[http://ourairports.com/data/](http://ourairports.com/data/)

------
vpontis
This is the type of thing that's so simple and rewarding that it makes me
annoyed that I hadn't thought of it and made it first! Really cool, good work!

------
Faint
Looks cool, but would have been a lot smoother in webGL

------
ghayes
This is awesome, and I really wish it would give me information on which
airport each tile represents.

~~~
svisser
You can hover over a tile to get the airport's name.

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naz
So cool (though it includes Plymouth City Airport, which is sadly closed)

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jlarocco
Neat, but it would be nice if it could zoom out a little more or adjust to the
browser window size. I have 2560x1600 display split into four equally sized
panes, and it's difficult to use and view in a single pane.

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ahh
This badly wants labels.

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saganus
This is awesome!

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ggchappell
Very nice!

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ngoldbaum
@shitsandwich just in case you see this, you are hellbanned.

~~~
vacri
I check someone's comment history before alerting them - the previous comments
by that handle were all trolls. Hellbanning is meant to block these users; no
point telling them.

~~~
tripzilch
Hellbanning (as opposed to the many, many other options available to a
moderator) is one of the most disrespectful and passive-aggressive types of
moderation.

To clarify, a hell-ban is the type of ban where a user's posts are hidden from
everybody except themselves (and on HN, those with "showdead" enabled in their
profile settings).

It ranks right between simply redirecting a login to a browser-bomb page
(which is slightly more evil, except for the part where it doesn't potentially
waste months of a person's time) and slow-bombing/random timeouts/delays
(which is ever so slightly less of a dick move to do to someone's account, yet
almost always works better than a hell-ban).

Except in the most extreme cases (anything short of a mentally disturbed,
obsessive, or dangerous person that otherwise just won't go away), reaching
for a hellban is always the wrong choice, because there's always another
moderation option that deals with the situation both more effectively, as well
with more respect and dignity to one's entire userbase.

