I’m speaking at ISEA2010 in the summer. My paper is about datalogging through GPS and what this means in terms of our relationships with the spaces/places we encounter and the journeys we experience. It’s meant that I’ve been looking more and more at maps and tracking so when flights stopped over Europe temporarily last week I became interested in the flightradar site. I started to log the flight activity at certain times each day to see how much it may be changing, but I wish I had started it earlier as I didn’t start doing it until Monday 19th (and the airspace restrictions over the UK were lifted on the Tuesday evening). I’m not sure what to do with this data yet so in the meantime I thought I would share the screen grabs to show a comparison in the amount of flights each day at 10am. The data really shows how many planes are about compared to closed airports/airspace although you can click on each flight on the website to see a flight path for it.

Monday 19th April 10am (UK airspace closed)

Wednesday 21st April 10am (UK airspace open)

The most interesting tracks for me that I managed to capture were those British Airways flights that wanted to land even though UK airspace was still closed at 8pm on the Tuesday evening. You can see how the planes were circling parts of the UK and Ireland obviously waiting for clearance. Shortly after capturing this, the news announced that most of the BA flights would be allowed to land at London airports and the airspace was allowed to open. I really like how the plane tracks depict a story of the flights in a standoff with the authorities. I’m glad I was able to capture this moments through screengrabs, as that’s the beauty of some of these tracked journeys is that like the trails of planes in the air, they are shown temporarily, and then all memory of that flight and it’s flight path is then gone for another track/trail to take its place.

BA Flight from Vancouver to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)

BA flight from San Francisco to Heathrow (Tuesday 20th April, 8pm)