Not, perhaps, in quite the way you might be anticipating!
A couple of weeks ago, I forwarded an item to my son, an airline Captain for some years now, that I read on the Big Think website. It was an item called The Accidental Beauty of Flight Paths.
The Accidental Beauty of Flight Paths
by FRANK JACOBS NOVEMBER 5, 2014There is more between heaven and earth than bird migrations and weather fronts. These maps capture the poetic beauty of something utterly mundane and usually invisible: the flight patterns of the planes that bring us from airport A to airport B.
We live in the age of mass air travel. At any given moment, there are about 10,000 commercial planes airborne, carrying an estimated half a million passengers across the skies. We also live in the era of Big Data. Which means that the movements of those thousands of planes can be followed in real time on websites such as Plane Finder and Flightradar24.
You can read the full article here.
Alex, my son, then replied with a link to this item on the UK NATS website: Take a guided tour around UK airspace.
The skies above the UK have been brought to life like never before in a video showing a day of air traffic in less than three minutes.
Created from actual radar data showing over 7,000 flights, the video graphically illustrates the daily task facing air traffic controllers and the airspace features that help make it all work.
It finishes with an overview of the structure of UK airspace, highlighting the major air routes and showing how this ‘invisible infrastructure’ helps underpin the entire operation.
Matt Mills, NATS Head of Digital Communications, said: “We’ve made data visualisations in the past, but we wanted to now take people on a deeper journey into what makes UK airspace work and some of its important features.
Airspace might be the invisible infrastructure, but it is every bit as important as the airports and runways on the ground.”
Created by air traffic management company, NATS, the video takes viewers on a unique tour of some of the key features of UK airspace – from the four holding stacks over London and the military training zones above Wales, to the helicopters delivering people and vital supplies to the North Sea oil and gas rigs.
It is a fascinating video.
Learning from Dogs 