But that's not what this is. Here only the airplanes are in the third dimension. The world map isn't even a globe
A non flat visualisation is what you could see for example on a 3D screen, augmented reality, or virtual reality.
Maybe I missed it, but it is always fun to see the origin and destination when looking at flight tracks.
Both this post's viewer and the older one I linked directly above have greatly exaggerated vertical scaling. It is not proportional to the distances on the map. With actual 1:1 height scale all these planes, even the stratospheric jets, would be much closer to the ground.
I wonder how feasible it would be to render all airplanes at once, not just those near the chosen airport. A quick google says there are about 12-14k planes in the air at any given time, which sounds reasonable to render with some optimizations
For the same reason, I made it open source, you can throw in your keys in there and can render all the flights, but keeping it open and free was the priority here, so had to compromise on the distance, but within a given city it has all the flights accurately.
For longer flights, large passenger aircraft will generally aim for something like 30k feet - the thinner air means less air resistance so more fuel efficiency (the cost is the fuel required to get there, which is why I said "for longer flights").
However, at that altitude the "jet stream" can cause winds of 100+ mph. This can be helpful with your direction of travel, or it can slow you down. If the jet stream was strong and trying to blow you backwards, it may have been more efficient to travel at a lower altitude where the jet stream wasn't present.
Fwiw, my use-case is simply throwing it on the TV as a screensaver of sorts for my nephews when someone they know is travelling. Just a way to make the world seem smaller!
It's led to some cute situations where their mom was flying almost directly over my dad living in our childhood home, and we video called him and directed him to the spot in the sky where my sister (his daughter) was flying over. Her kids were ecstatic. We live in interesting times
jessekv•1h ago