Watch the world's 'swarming' flight paths in action: Beautiful multicoloured visualisation reveals air traffic across the globe
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More than 102,000 flights are made every day across the world.
To put this into perspective, a web developer has created a beautiful visualisation that simulates each of these flights on a globe.
The Flight Stream visualisation doesn't show real-time positions of these flights, but rather routes between major airports - and the result resembles swarms of fireflies.
Click the interactive tool below
Flight Stream was created by San Francisco-based web developer Callum Prentice. He used data from the Open Flights database to plot the number and location of flights and airports around the world. The animation has been designed for desktop browsers, but Mr Prentice has also created a video for people on mobiles
Flight Stream was created by San Francisco-based web developer Callum Prentice.
He used data from the Open Flights database to plot the number and location of flights and airports around the world, which includes 59,036 routes between 3,209 airports on 531 airlines as of January 2012.
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The site was created as an 'experiment to map many of the airline flights between world airports,' explained Mr Prentice.
Tools on the site let visitors control the opacity of the individual flight tracks, change the size of the airports as well as adjust the speed of the animation.
The animation has been designed for desktop browsers, but Mr Prentice has also created a video for people on mobiles to be able to view the animation.
Mr Prentice told MailOnline the visualisation was just a hobby, and admitted that there is so much data around major airports, 'it just blurs into a mess', but the visualisation was fun to do and 'looks pretty.'
The British-born developer currently works for 3D Virtual World Second Life in California and has released the code for his Flight Stream design, as well as his other interactive projects, on his website.
Last year, Nats (formerly known as National Air Traffic Services), produced the third in its series of air traffic visualisations, taking a tour of the UK's airspace, called UK 24.
During the visualisation, around 7,000 flights are shown entering and leaving UK airspace.
The day starts with the bow wave of transatlantic traffic heading towards the UK on organised and separated tracks.
This is joined by traffic from Europe and the first waves of departures from UK airports.
Traffic levels are then seen growing to reveal the main 'trunk roads', or routes, of airspace as well as the hubs around London, Manchester and central Scotland.
The visualisation then shows holding stacks over London, also known as a holding manoeuvre that is used to delay a flight from landing, but keep it within the airspace.
This is particularly key around Heathrow, continued Mr Kelly, which provides 'the constant flow of traffic that makes it the world's busiest dual runway airport with 1,350 movements a day.'
At Heathrow alone, goods worth £133 billion were shipped in and out last year, more than the combined value of goods transiting through the UK's two largest ports, Felixstowe and Southampton.
The tour then moves around the UK to include the other major airports, NATS' two control centres in Swanwick and Prestwick, and general aviation traffic.
There are also visualisations of military training flights, showing RAF jets performing training manoeuvres off the east coast of England and near to north Wales.
The site was created as an 'experiment to map many of the airline flights between world airports,' explained Mr Prentice. Tools on the site let visitors control the opacity of the flight tracks (left), change the size of the airports (right) as well as adjust the speed of the animation
It then reveals a 'spider's web of helicopter tracks' that originate from Aberdeen, taking people and supplies to and from the North Sea oil and gas rigs.
'We hope you enjoy this insight into the complexity and beauty of a day of UK air traffic and the value of airspace as the invisible infrastructure that makes it all work,' added Mr Kelly.
To create the video, visualisation experts from a company called 422 South combined 24 hours worth of flight radar data from all UK flights.
Computer artists then used specially developed software to convert the longitude, latitude and height data into luminous dots, which were accurately positioned over satellite images of Britain, by day and by night.
Last year, NATS (formerly known as National Air Traffic Services), produced the third in its series of air traffic visualisations, taking a tour of the UK's airspace, called UK 24. To create the video, experts from a company called 422 South combined 24 hours worth of flight radar data from all UK flights. Computer artists then used specially developed software to convert the longitude, latitude and height data into dots
NATS, from its control centre in Prestwick, is responsible for providing the air traffic control service to the Shanwick OCA, which is the busiest of all North Atlantic Airspace regions.
Around 80 per cent of all North Atlantic Air Traffic passes through it.
The firm's Europe visualisation was an amalgamation of UK radar data, taken on 21 June 2013, combined with European flight plan information from 28 July last year.
The day starts with the bow wave of transatlantic traffic heading towards the UK on organised and separated tracks. This is joined by traffic from Europe and the first waves of departures from UK airports. Traffic levels are then seen growing to reveal the main 'trunk roads', or routes (pictured), of airspace, as well as the hubs around London, Manchester and central Scotland
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