Flights and Airports - A Visual Analytics Perspective

The increasing complexity and amount of data in the flight sector requires innovative approaches for data analyses and interactive visualizations that uncover patterns and anomalies in such data. Such insights are important for many people including tourists, travelers, investors, as well as security staff. To reach this goal we describe a visual analytics perspective on flights and airports to explore geo-spatial and temporal effects in flight traffic data. To tap the full potential of our tool we focus on the global world-wide flight traffic and discuss patterns, insights, and knowledge that we detected under the light of certain temporal events like Covid-19, holiday seasons, or the building of new airports. We also analyze the geo-spatial aspect in the data and the role of airport locations on prominent data patterns. The visual analytics tool is composed of several interactively linked and coordinated views in which visualizations and algorithms like trend detection and hierarchical clustering support the identification of typical spatio-temporal patterns and anomalies. We conclude the paper by discussing future directions and challenges.