Flight routes and waypoint references visualised

Aircraft navigate the skies along routes of waypoints and beacons. A waypoint is a specified geographical location used to define the route. Shown here are a very small sample of flight navigation routes around the globe.

A flight route and waypoints between Vienna and Palma de Mallorca. Waypoints are used to indicate a change in direction, speed, or altitude along the desired path.

A realtime interactive view of a selection of flight routes around the globe.

About this project

Plotting specific routes and waypoints on a replica of the Earth is a straightforward process. The challenge this project presented was creating a visually interesting map of a handful of flight routes, without exceeding mobile device memory restrictions.

Displaying a variety of differing routes, across the globe, within a budget of 100,000 triangles meant route selection was crucial. A tetrahedron is the simplest of the ordinary convex polyhedra requiring just four vertices per instance, so this was used to indicate each individual waypoint, minimising the number of polygons required.