Passenger planes flying too close

Sometimes passenger planes get a little too close to each other on takeoff and landing due to miscommunication and understaffing from air traffic control. From The New York Times, near collisions might happen more often than the steady flight captain’s overhead voice would have you believe.

A series of animated flight paths, albeit sped up, show the close calls.

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A year of flight paths, for someone with an unlimited pass

United Airlines sold a lifetime unlimited pass in 1990 for $290,000. Tom Stuker bought one and has since flown 23 million miles over the decades. For The Washington Post, Rick Reilly, with graphics by Youyou Zhou, described the flight patterns of a man who figured out how to turn his unlimited miles into unlimited upgrades and gift cards.

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Southwest flight cancellations

There were a lot of flight cancellations this week, but Southwest Airlines is on another level. This straightforward chart by Matt Stiles for CNN says it all.

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Finding illegal airstrips in Brazil

Using a combination of satellite imagery, crowdsourced databases, and analyses, The New York Times identified airstrips used for illegal mining in Brazil:

To confirm these locations and connect them with illicit mining, Times reporters built a tool to help analyze thousands of satellite images. They examined historical satellite imagery to determine that 1,269 unregistered airstrips still appeared in active use within the past year. They documented telltale signs of mining nearby, such as clear cut areas of rainforest and pools that miners use to separate dirt from ore. And they determined that hundreds of the airstrips in mining areas are within Indigenous and protected lands, where any form of mining is against the law.

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Shifting flight paths for wealthy Russians

For The New York Times, Pablo Robles, Anton Troianovski, and Agnes Chang mapped the change in destinations for Russian private jets, before and after sanctions. Before, it was more about Paris, Milan, and Geneva. After, Dubai became a top destination.

I like the charts after the map. A slope chart with a white fill provides contrast and a flight departures board gives a little something extra.

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Empty Ukrainian airspace

As you would imagine, Ukrainian airspace looks empty right now. Reuters mapped flights before the Russian invasion, the day of, and after the European Union airspace ban. The above shows private, commercial, and cargo flights. In separate maps, Reuters also reported unidentified flights, along with detours, cancelations, and the general disruption of international airspace.

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Rerouted flights to avoid Russian airspace

Many countries have banned Russian aircraft from entering their airspace. Russian in turn has banned other countries. For Bloomberg, Mira Rojanasakul and Jin Wu mapped current bans and showed how flights have had to reroute.

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When the world shut down, seen through global flights

Lauren Tierney and William Neff for The Washington Post used a rotating globe to show how connections between countries quickly shut down as the coronavirus spread.

I’m looking forward to when we get to watch the map in reverse.

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Canceled flights due to coronavirus

With an animated side-by-side map, The New York Times shows canceled flights in efforts to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. The left map represents 12,814 flights within China on January 23. The right map shows 1,662 on February 13. Keep scrolling to see changes for flights leaving China to other countries.

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Mapping the cheapest flights to everywhere, given your location

Sometimes you really do need to get away. Escape, part search engine and part research project from students at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory in Singapore, shows you the cheapest flights out of any given city. Just put in a location, and you get color-coded connections to everywhere around the world.

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