The Exquisite Geometry of Global Flight Paths

Because it feels right now like air travel is fraught with danger, we thought we'd pull back for a minute from that availability heuristic to gawk at the beauty of the global flight network as it appears from beyond 40,000 feet.

If you have not already stumbled across Contrailz, Alexey Papulovskiy's worldwide map of civilian plane built with a billion dots, you will easily get lost here. Airplane routes are always a visually rich topic. Our John Metcalfe wrote earlier this spring about a lovely animation of flight paths over the U.S. Contrailz, though static, extends these patterns to the entire globe. In fact, some of the most interesting mid-air designs occur far from airports, out at sea or north of Cananda, where the repeated routes of long-distance flights create a kind of reassuring rhythm.