A consultant group has created graphics showing the flight path of planes around the world, allowing people to see how travelers crisscross the globe, according to FOX news.
Michael Markieta, a Canadian GIS consultant for the global engineering and design firm Arup, spent a year tracing approximately 58,000 routes on major and regional airlines around the globe using information systems technology to create the graphics that show flight paths.
The map uses light blue lines to represent each individual flight path and bright white nodes to represent places where multiple routes intersect or overlap.
The world's busiest airport is Atlanta, but the airport with the most connections is Frankfurt International in Germany. Some of the other busiest airports included Sao Paulo, Beijing, Sydney and Cairo.
Markieta began working on creating the visual graphics in his spare time, using data he found at the open-source project openflights.org. His hope is that the project will be useful for researchers in various fields that need to understand more about global connectivity.
Arup, meanwhile, has determined that climate change is a threat to the aviation industry, with 150 airports at risk with a rising sea level.
Flight paths to Australia and New Zealand also appear less densely populated, though Sydney is still a popular destination.
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