I found this fascinating, both as a frequent flier and just as a modern human:
Each yellow dot represents an aircraft in flight. At the start of the video, the “shadow” representing nighttime covers the Eastern US, the Atlantic, Europe/Africa and the Middle East. Over the next minute or so we see a day’s worth of traffic represented as the shadow moves from East to West ultimately returning to its original position after a full day is completed.
Here are some things that caught my attention:
- Having flown trans-atlantic evening flights, I recognized at the start of the video how night descends on the US as many flights take off across the Atlantic, pass South of Greenland under the shadow of night and reach Europe as the sun rises.
- I looked for signs of my recent trip to Taiwan and Japan: flights leaving in the morning from US and chasing the Sun westward, but found relatively few flights. Interesting to see the relative amount of traffic from US to Asia as compared with trips to Europe.
- Travel within the US and within Europe is amazing! It’s like watching bees in a hive.
- With credit due to a YouTube commenter:
WOW. Brazil is conquering Portugal by airplane.
Perhaps it’s not quite that extreme, but to my eye there is greater travel between former colonies and their colonizers. I don’t know whether that is family-driven, long-standing business ties, or is simply an impact of language familiarity, but it does appear to be a real phenomenon.
- Flights that go through the arctic circle are quite common, antarctic not so much. At around the 0:50 mark I noticed a flight leaving southern Africa bound for Australia that dips pretty far South. One lone craft covering a lot of otherwise empty-looking ocean/mapspace.
What other interesting trends do you see in the images?
The Wrong Sox 