Southwest USA - 24 Brilliant Hours of U.S. Flights

Altitude: Dark colors indicate a higher altitude; lighter shades indicate takeoff and landing.

Two million flights pass through New York's airspace each year. Artist Aaron Koblin used images from his piece, Flight Patterns, to create a Google map representing air traffic across the United States over a 24-hour period. The map displays the flight paths for more than 205,000 aircraft the FAA tracked on August 12, 2008.

Using data provided by FlightView, a service that provides real-time air-travel information, Koblin layers flight patterns by altitude, aircraft model and manufacturer.

This work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the project "Celestial Mechanics" by colleagues Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya.