Ever wondered how many things move in the sky daily? Well, Google Trends came up with an answer to our question with their Google Flights Visualisation. Google Flights is a visualisation designed to show the flights moving over U.S. one day before Thanksgiving, 2015. The visualization begins with the start of the day and shows all the flights that have crossed U.S. in that one day till midnight. While the visualization does not give the flight details, users can easily understand which times of the day are more popular for international and domestic flights and, for flights to and from different hubs around the country. The visualization does use different color codes for various airlines but due to the fast-moving inbuilt timeline, users cannot make the most use of this feature.
In my opinion, though the visualization is very attractive, it is not very informative. No real data can be inferred from just looking at the screen. There is no option to filter out the data based on international or domestic flights, or based on different airlines for any given point in the day. The zoom-in and zoom-out feature also doesn’t seem to be of much help since no new data is visible even after zooming in on a particular point. According to me, this visualization could have been better if the user had tried to represent more data than focusing on animations.
Reference:
http://googletrends.github.io/iframe-scaffolder/#/view?urls=Thanksgiving%202015%7Chttps:%252F%252Fgoogledataorg.cartodb.com%252Fu%252Fgoogledata%252Fviz%252Fbf595f4c-7381-11e5-9ec5-42010a14800c%252Fembed_map&active=0&sharing=1&autoplay=0&loop=1&layout=narrative&theme=red&title=A%20day%20in%20the%20life:%20US%20Thanksgiving%20on%20Google%20Flights&description=The%20day%20before%20Thanksgiving%202015%20shown%20in%20US%20domestic%20and%20international%20air%20travel%20booked%20with%20Google%20Flights