As seen by the FAA... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This has been sitting in my edit queue since the end of January, so you might have already seen Aaron Koblin's visualisations (via Digg) showing the air traffic over the continental United States and how the traffic changes with time. But if not, they make interesting viewing...

CREDIT: Aaron Koblin

Air traffic as seen by the FAA
The sweep of sunrise across the U.S. is very evident in these visualisations, but there are other interesting patterns that emerge from the data that aren't quite as easily explained. I'm presuming a lot of these arise out of the background noise due to the way the airlines schedule connecting flights, and how they route their aircraft over the course of the day?