Flight Network
The world's air routes as a network: find the fewest flights between any two airports and see which hubs hold it together.
Loading the route network...
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How it works
Method
Every direct route is drawn as a great-circle arc, with busier airports brighter and larger. The route finder searches the network for the fewest flights between two airports, then the shortest distance among those. The hub rankings show two kinds of importance: how many airports one connects to directly, and how often it sits on the shortest trips between other airports.
Data
Airports and routes from OpenFlights: 3,214 airports and about 37,000 one-way routes as of June 2014, when OpenFlights stopped updating its route data. It is a historical snapshot, not today's schedules. Earth imagery from NASA.
Model
No learned model: graph analysis. The route finder is a breadth-first search (fewest flights), with ties broken by great-circle distance. Betweenness centrality, computed ahead of time with NetworkX, counts the share of shortest routes between all other airport pairs that pass through each airport.
Build
The shared three.js globe, with all 18,858 airport pairs drawn as arcs on the GPU (the busiest 7,000 on phones). The network is one static file, and the route finder runs in your browser. There is no server.