North American Animated Flight Atlas

Abstract

There are many different landscapes. The landscape mapped here forms in the sky as thousands of aircraft are carefully choreographed by ground control to ferry passengers from one place to another. It is this landscape of constantly moving air traffic that is the subject of a new atlas. The maps in the North American Animated Flight Atlas are animations depicting flight traffic over North America. All animations depict traffic over 24-hour periods. Over 70 animations are presented on a DVD depicting flight traffic by airline, airplane, airport, and route. The minute-by-minute location of airplanes was mapped using a program called Flyte Trax from FlyteComm, Inc. The program updates the position of flights in real time and also allows the filtering” of flights based on the aircraft, airline, and the departure or arrival airport. At 1440 frames each (the number of minutes in a day), over 100,000 individual maps were used to create the animations. Animation files are between 5 MB and 66 MB in size for a total of about 1.6 GB. The animations present a landscape of flight traffic that is made visible through the atlas for the first time. This article examines the construction of the animations, some of the resultant patterns, and presents a single animation depicting all inbound and outbound commercial traffic for Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport.