aaronkoblin.com — The Flight Patterns visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. These are some amazing videos of air traffic over the USA as seen by the FAA.
Jan 26, 2007 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJan 27, 2007
Where are all those planes going that vanish at a spot between Hawaii and California?
teeheeheeJan 27, 2007
Depending on what data source is being used here these may also be international flights. After the plane is in international airspace the FAA may know where it is but it may not make that information publicly accessible for some reason.The publicly accessible FAA data primarily contains commercial and general aviation flights over the US and some parts of Canada and Mexico, and depending on levels of clearance and security London as well. Occasionally information over foreign air space is also available, but this is the exception and not the rule.Also, Military flight information is not accessible to the public with FAA data. What is shown here is commercial and general aviation only.The data the FAA has is aggregated from many different sources including land-based radar and equipment on board of the aircraft. When a flight is over the water there is no radar information and location is given by this equipment or by radio communication with the pilots. It is often the case that international flights no longer needing to be tracked by the FAA are taken out of the system.Also, some sources of data that goes into the aggregated set aren't as reliable. Information from Mexican airspace is usually not as high quality - I have no idea why, I just know that this is the case. Information from Europe or Asia is usually not as useful to the FAA, may or may not be as reliable, and may be in a format not currently usable.There may also be legal and political restrictions on using and providing aircraft identification and location data once the flight has entered a different airspace.FYI - I am not a pilot, but I do work with flight tracking.
veryangryjimJan 27, 2007
"Don't join that career yet. This is one of the most innacurate story titles I have ever seen, and even though the videos were amazing, these are clearly NOT the air traffic visualizations seen by the FAA, they are just renderings based on FAA data."don't worry, I wasn't assuming that's what air traffic controllers stare at all day. I know what real radar looks like.
mutatronJan 27, 2007
Yes, and if you keep coming back to Digg, you'll see this one again in a couple of months.
bigbchewJan 27, 2007
Pretty darn cool. Love to see an international version of this too.
havalocJan 28, 2007
@rob...<a class="user" href="http://flightaware.com">http://flightaware.com</a>
patthewJan 28, 2007
Why are none of the decent looking pictures available as wallpapers?
componentFeb 2, 2007
This reminds me of Stamen Design's Taxi Cab visualizations called Cabspotting.Stamen is the firm who did Digg Labs. Cabspotting: <a class="user" href="http://stamen.com/clients/cabspotting">http://stamen.com/clients/cabspotting</a>