DSD

Wired Mag­a­zine has an inter­est­ing arti­cle about redesign­ing North Amer­i­can flight paths to improve effi­ciency.^[1] (via Rachel Mad­dow)

It’s sort of what you’d expect: flight pat­terns were orig­i­nally drawn up decades ago, and have been added to hap­haz­ardly and chaot­i­cally since then, like the streets in Boston.

The redesign cre­ates a kind of air­borne sub­ur­bia, paving the skies far out into what was the coun­try­side. The idea is that the con­trollers can get planes off the inter­city high­ways sooner, keep­ing them clear for through-traffic.

Right, so who cares about that? The point is, there are pretty pic­tures! Aaron Koblin has a pretty awe­some page up with visu­al­iza­tions of US flight paths.

US flight patterns

south­west

1. The arti­cle is nice enough, though quotes like this one make me cringe a bit:

   While a mov­ing object in the ter­res­trial world can be tracked with four vari­ables — lat­i­tude, lon­gi­tude, speed, and time — an air­plane soar­ing along a flight path adds a fifth — alti­tude.

   There are some vari­ables miss­ing here, like the direc­tion of motion. I’m not sure why Wired decided to leave them out. For the sake of clar­ity? Unclear. [↩]