European Flights in 3D
Last year I put together a visualisation of some aircraft flights that I constructed by scraping Qantas timetables from their web site and interpolating the flight data between airports.
The biggest weakness with this was the lack of detail. Really, all I had was a start and end point for the flight, so I was just drawing lines assuming a straight line and a constant velocity. More recently I was trawling through some posts on an astronomy forum and someone was asking if there was some way they could determine what flight they were looking at whenever they saw a plane pass over (aircraft at night can sometimes look very odd). Some people pointed out that airports have FIDS services that provide information about aircraft departures and arrivals. That’s not much better than scraping the Qantas site for my purposes, but it got me thinking – are there any other datasets for flights online?
The most famous example of a aircraft flight visualisation that I know of is Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns piece. He used a combination of processing and Maya to render the lines and shapes that are drawn by the ghosts of aircraft as they make their way across the continental United States. For his piece Koblin used data from the US Federal Aviation Authority. I have no idea how he got the data he used. Certainly, in the post-911 age of where terrorism is a constant source of anxiety for some, looking to access things like flight data is going to raise the wrong sorts of eyebrows.
Nonetheless, I did find something: OpenATC. OpenATC provides flight data for airlines based on information that enthusiasts can collect with a radar dish and a $1000 device called an SDS-1. These can be used to grab flight data reported by aircraft as they pass near a person with an SDS-1 set up. At the time of writing, there’s pretty good coverage for Europe and some coverage in NSW in Australia, but very little elsewhere.
Inspired by Koblin’s work, I did a 3D version in processing. You can see the results here: http://noobtronic.blip.tv/
