Thursday, April 08, 2010

24 Hours of Air Traffic


Very cool video. I've watched it about a dozen times now. A few notes of interest to me:
  • Watch the air traffic over the Atlantic. All one direction and then the other. Same thing over the Pacific but it's not as dramatic.
  • Keep an eye on the flights over the US at night. Red eye flights are almost exclusively west to east. Movies and TV shows screw this up all the time.
  • Note the huge difference in volume of air travel between night and day. It makes plenty of sense but the look of it is bigger than you'd expect.
  • The exception to that is India. There is some difference but the rate of travel is nearly constant all day. I don't know why this is but it jibes with my booking experiences.

8 comments:

Brian said...

Very cool! We have this live in the tower! It wont let me put in a link... search youtube
September 11: FAA Closure of US Airspace

Peder said...

Here is what Heidi is mentioning:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo1ZtpKqlYw

Hans said...

That is very cool. Who knew that airplanes look like very bright lights when seen from space?

Peder said...

Hans, that's the release of energy as they re-enter the atmosphere.

Heidi said...

I realized Brian's comment was quick and left a few things out. We have a view of all the world traffic at any given moment. It is cool!

Peder said...

Heidi, who flies way up there above the Arctic Ocean?

Heidi said...

Almost all our flights to Europe go up over the top.

j said...

That is wicked awesome. One of the coolest things I've seen.