VATSIM Traffic Timelapse

[Daniel Hawton]

Ever wonder what 24 hours of flights on VATSIM looks like? I did.

 

Using data collected by AirStats, I applied some math and created a time lapse of VATSIM traffic from 6/16/2017 0000Z until 6/16/2017 2359Z. See 24 hours of traffic in 4 minutes 44 seconds. It involved 2038 flights and 129,700 position reports (and about double that of mathematically calculated estimated positions).

 

Only flights that had flight plans, were on the within 500 feet AGL and 3nm of the departure and arrival airports for those phases and remained connected to VATSIM the entire time were logged. Only aircraft with a speed of 30 knots or more are shown. Position reports are speed based, <100 knots, every 10 minutes, 100-250 knots every 5 minutes, 250+ knots every 2 minutes. Positions are calculated for every minute.

 

The video can be found here:

Data obtained from: https://www.airstats.net

 

Hope you enjoy it.

[Markus Schober 1328585]

Awesome! Thanks for compiling and sharing this. Nice soundtrack, too.

[Jim Hurst 1353723]

Thanks for putting that together Daniel.

 

I too, enjoyed the soundtrack, and was pleasantly surprised to see one of my flights was in the data (from CYOD-CYYB) during that time period.

 

 

Cheers,

Jim

[Daniel Hawton]

At the request of the ZTL staff, a timelapse was created of their event from 6/9

using some new formulas that make the timelapses appear smoother.

[Daniel Hawton]

Made a number of improvements to the math formulas and data conversions... position reports every 2 minutes are now calculated down to variable intervals depending on the project I'm using it for. This is Europe over a 24 hour period on Saturday 6/24/2017 (0000-2359Z) with intervals set to every 10 seconds. Makes flights look really smooth

data from https://www.airstats.net.

 

The numbers: ~2200 aircraft, 720 snapshots from the VATSIM data feeds (~2 minutes over 24 hours) fed into math calculations to generate 8640 snapshot ticks representing 10 second intervals.