I had the interesting experience of seeing a presentation on this air traffic mapping system at a conference last year, perhaps by the same NASA folks responsible for this movie. At the conference, they showed a comparison between a 'normal' 24 hour cycle of air traffic movement, versus air traffic on the day of September 11, 2001.

As the day begins, one sees the East Coast light up first, with steadily growing activity out of each of the hubs. The wave rolls westward as the sun rises. Memphis lights up especially brightly, as a flood of FedEx aircraft come and go. On a normal day, the wave hits the West Coast, and the entire continent becomes a frighteningly dense mass of traffic.

In the September 11 map, everything continues normally in this pattern, until the 'wave' is most of the way across the continent. Shortly after the attack, all continues to look normal (and no, given the density of the aircraft around JFK, it's not possible to see the two aircraft disappear from the radar map). Some time passes, and then the most amazing pattern starts to emerge, as air traffic is grounded. As if the continent was a leaky bathtub, air traffic appears to be sucked towards points across the country, and disappear. One hour later, the map, which on a normal day would be a blue mass of traffic, is almost totally empty, although scattered traffic still appears (presumably still in transit to an available landing point).

It was an exceedingly interesting and sombering presentation.

They look like swarming ants.

plugh (/m1) I would guess that those flights "originating" off the East Coast are probably coming from Europe. I'd guess that this is just showing domestic US ATC data; the planes "appear" when they enter US controlled airspace, and "disappear" when they get handed off to someone else's ATC system.

after seeing this video, I was amazed, so much trafic and so many take offs and landings. people being transported left right and center. Some time its strange seeing the world from a birds eye view. its so simple in a hard to understand way, if you understand me.
twist_and_nots@hotmail.com

Personally I think it's pretty interesting. It's easy not only to see the hubs, but to note the inordinate amount of traffic to Memphis.
I really enjoy flying. It's just too bad that getting on the plane is such an annoying hassle.

it's some sort of weird quicktime animated gif. can anyone post it in a format that people have heard of?

took a long while to download, not positive it was worth it.

Big fun: spot Concorde!

Edited by author 05-08-2003 09:01 PM
Some of those flights appear to originate somewhere out over the water off the East Coast. Now *that's* scary.


could be halifax. not quite as scary as it is drunk.

Why can't NASA at least use a portable movie format?

$ xanim facet24.mov
XAnim Rev 2.80.0 by Mark Podlipec Copyright (C) 1991-1999. All Rights Reserved
  Video Codec: Unknown gif (67696620) not yet supported.(E8)
  Video Codec: Unknown gif (67696620) not yet supported.(E8)
  Notice: Video is present, but not yet supported.

$ mplayer facet24.mov
MPlayer 0.90rc1-3.0.3 (C) 2000-2002 Arpad Gereoffy (see DOCS)
[...]
Detected QuickTime/MOV file format!
--------------
MOV track #0: 190 chunks, 567 samples
MOV: Found unknown movie atom Allocated 256 entries for palette
Loading palette from file
Image size: 777 x 600 (8 bpp)
Display size: 777 x 600
Fourcc: gif Codec: 'GIF'
[...]
Can't find codec matching selected -vo and video format 0x20666967!

Some of those flights appear to originate somewhere out over the water off the East Coast. Now *that's* scary.

Can I just say that seeing this makes me never want to fly again? :-)