Airspace above the South West of the UK
Around the world airspace is divided into three-dimensional blocks, the classification of which determines flight rules which apply and minimum air traffic services which are provided.
Visualising these blocks helps to provide a sense of the relative altitudes of aircraft and the shapes and sizes of controlled airspace.
A high-level look at airspace above the South West of the United Kingdom.
A closer look at airspace allocation near the South Coast.
About this project
The initial step in this project involved converting available geospatial data into a format that Houdini could work with. This was achieved using Swift scripting within Xcode.
Once into Houdini it was necessary to plot all of the blocks using their area, base and ceiling information. It became clear that in the UK, across five classes of airspace, there are a lot of these blocks to render.
To maintain realtime interactivity, it was determined that choosing a small section of the UK would show enough detail to visualise the concept yet still keep polygon counts usable. After iterative testing over a number of sections, an ideal result was achieved.
You can also discover more detail about class A and C airspace blocks over the UK, as well as visualising the six oceanic control areas of the NAT HLA.
Surface textures copyright Mapbox and OpenStreetMap.