The Dance of Flight
A lot of us may be traveling during the holidays, and considering there’s roughly 50,000 planes in the air over the US every single day, that means a lot of airport sitting during delays, airport sleeping during cancellations, and stressing during traffic delays that make you want to head butt a basket of kittens.
But it isn’t all mechanical problems and outrageous baggage fees. Here are a couple of videos to remind you how amazing and beautiful flight can be. (Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch to keep that in mind while some TSA agent gropes your junk looking for weapons of mass destruction, but go with it.)
The first vid, “Paths of Flight” is from GE Aviation designs, and they wanted to show us the “intricate choreography” of take offs and landings. So they spent 24 hours doing time-lapse video at different airports of 63 different planes. Unbelievable how precise the flight paths are.
The next video is from “data visualization artist” Aaron Koblin. He created it (and the image above), by taking data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and processing it into an animation of flight patterns. Any question now why your last flight took of 45 minutes late? Watching these, it’s a wonder any flights take off on time.
