1.
Mapping Air Population
&
Mapping Real-Time Flight Data
Michael P. Peterson & Paul Hunt &
Konrad Weiß
Geography / Geology
University of Nebraska at Omaha

2.
Air Population
• Air population refers to the total number of
people flying above the earth at any point in
time.
– a distinct and separate population from those still
physically connected to earth
• Ephemeral, like urban areas having a “high
daytime population”
– Air population exhibits similar daily patterns

3.
Animated Atlas: Air Traffic over North
America – 2007
• 75 animations, frame-based, 2003-2006
– Total flights, by airline, by aircraft, by city, by
corridors, by region, by states
– Condensing 24-hours into 30-seconds
– Showed flight patterns
• Pulsating hubs
• Red-eye flights
• Popcorn commuter traffic

4.
LAX

5.
JFK

6.
United Airlines

7.
United Airlines – pulsating hubs

8.
“Popcorn” Commuter Flights

9.
Data
• Atlas based on FAA data
• Flight tracking companies now collect data
- FlightAware,
- FlightRadar24,
- PlaneFinder
- Automatic Dependent
Surveillance-Broadcast
(ADS-B)
- Raspberry Pi, dongle
and filter
$85 total

10.
FlightAware PiAware Sites
Urumqi, China

11.
Air Population
• Comment made to Paul: We should map the
number of people flying above the US.
• Pursued FAA connection
– Needed dedicated hardware (router, server)
– Special Connection (IPsec)
– Installation of specialized data communication
software
• Designed for data security

12.
Solution
• Flight Tracking companies
– All present maps of current traffic
– Read data from their server using JavaScript
• AJAX through proxy server
• Organized by individual tile
– Duplicated their data retrieval methods
– Retrieving lat/long of flights, airline, aircraft, etc.

13.
Evolving Implementation
• Initial implementation was real-time
– flight data was requested on page load
• Later we decided we wanted more than just a
snap shot
– Began storing a day’s worth of data
– required server side database
– Now hourly requests stored (no more on-demand)
• In the future we will use this for daily
animations

14.
Programmatic Methods
• Mapping done with ESRI ArcGIS API for
JavaScript
– API performs spatial queries that allows features
to be intersected based on geographic location
– General Programmatic tasks
• Flight data requested from database (AJAX)
• Planes enhanced with population data
• Planes (JSON objects) are added to map as points
• Planes (and attributes) spatially aggregated to states

15.
Live Demonstration

16.
Map of Planes

17.
Air Population by State

18.
Ratio of Air to Ground Population

19.
Air Population Density

20.
Heatmap

21.
5 AM

22.
7 AM

23.
9 AM

24.
3 PM

25.
11 PM

26.
3 AM Ratio Air to Ground

27.
3 PM Ratio Air to Ground