World Air Traffic Flowchart

This innovative map shows the GIS capabilities representing world international air traffic flow statistical data and relative traffic densities for the year 2002. It features 35,460 routes and 3,808 aerodromes. A spectrum of color was used to display overlapping routes, ranging from blue to red, which when viewed with ChromaDepth™ glasses will separate three-dimensionally into their respective layers.

Aerodromes are presented as relative traffic-graded symbols by which total movements for each aerodrome are displayed. Routes were calculated using a great circle calculation, which rendered the shortest distance between destinations. Some 350,000 great circle vectors have been included in this chart.

The aerodromes were featured as relative-valued graduated symbols, which were modified many times. Total movements for each aerodrome were featured as a subtotal calculated with reference to the spatial analysis. All routes were featured as great circles calculated using a great circle calculation that obtained the shortest distance between two destinations.

Creating this map was a challenging exercise. Demonstrating all the data on the map clearly and displaying areas with overlapping routes using color spectrum ranging from blue to red were difficult tasks. The difficulties encountered in this exercise were the number of vectors that needed to be generated in Visual Basic, records that neared zero degree gave false results, and the number of vector lines that passed across the longitude at 180 degrees east had to be managed differently to be reconnected at 180 degrees west longitude.

This data will be loaded in an ArcIMS application to enable users to interactively navigate and query a range of information. A reference tool is under development to address the need for determining more efficient route systems and analyzing the most cost-effective routes through flight information regions.