Take raw FAA radar data of private and commercial air traffic to, from, and over North America. Time-lapse it into an animation. Result? Amazing. Beautiful. Educational. (Did you know there were that many aircraft airborne or how the traffic patterns vary through the day?)

I don't get the bubbles, but oh well, nothing's perfect.

Takes a moment to load but it's worth the wait.

http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/FPWeb_Final_2.mov

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Yeah, I've heard that the US moves more planes in a day than any other country does in a year. Washington Air Route Traffic Control Center has more operations than all of Canada or the EU.

I don't know if this has been posted before, but here's a look at the dead-of-night operations at FedEx's hub in MEM. Keep in mind the aircrews are not concerned with passenger comfort because boxes don't complain. Very few passenger jets would want to get as close to thunderstorms.

MEM

That's hilarious. That app looks like Flight Explorer, which we had when I worked in American's ops center. Used to be cool to dial up DFW arrivals...you could see several inbound complexes (the sets of connecting flights that arrive and depart up to ten times daily at major hubs) at a time, coming in waves, one about to land, another a couple of hours out, and sometimes even more an hour or so behind those. Amazing to watch.

I'm pretty lucky that Denver has eight arrival gates and a whole lotta concrete. The final still gets up to 40 miles sometimes, though. Denver does get spontaneous thunderstorms directly over the airport every so often in the summer, so I'd like to see a similar time-lapse of a no-notice shutoff. I can't find one, but if you can, post up! It would probably not be as entertaining, as they normally just start holding stacks until the storm moves off.

You were a dispatcher?

Weren't you thinking about taking a job at DEN? Whatever happened to that?

No, not a dispatcher, I was 'officially' an Operations Analyst but my job was special projects like charters, aircraft filming, security exercises, researching events, and such. Pretty much anything that didn't fit the mold landed on my desk. For example, one of my projects was working with the film production company that made the movie that plays at the C.R. Smith Museum.

It was a great job and I miss it.

Denver's on hold until at least next year.