There are a handful of flight path visualizations out there, but I've always wanted to have a go at my own.

These below videos are built with Processing and, for the moment, assume direct - straight line - flight paths; something that needs to be improved for the next versions.

London departures

The first is a visualization of flight departures out of London Heathrow - approximately 530 of them. Their departures and arrivals are not staggered at all, so it is only really an aesthetic visualization at the moment.

The first is a visualization of flight departures out of London Heathrow - approximately 530 of them. Their departures and arrivals are not staggered at all, so it is only really an aesthetic visualization at the moment.

Flight path visualization - London departures from Kester Dobson on Vimeo.

Global departures

The second is of flights departing from across the world - just over 40,000 of them. They change from orange to yellow as they approach their destination.

Flight path visualization - global departures from Kester Dobson on Vimeo.

What's next?

After a week away, I'm hoping to do a US-centric example; it is astounding how much internal air traffic there is. I'm also looking to add parabolic flight paths and introduce a third dimension (a good example is blprnt's twitter flight analysis).

I'm suspicious that China doesn't have more internal traffic - perhaps something to do with the data source I used; worth looking into.