Hello everyone! I recently created this visualisation for a uni project and thought this subreddit might find it interesting. It represents connections between the world’s 200 largest airports. The circles are airports, with their colour based on the total number of seats in flights connected to them (also to airports not represented in the visualisation) and their size based on how the number of connections with them. The lines are connections between airports, with their weight based on the number of individual routes connecting two airports. The data comes from the World Bank and openflights.org and is sadly not very up to date: Flight data is up to 2014 and airport data up to 2019. The visualisation was created using Gephi and the Force Atlas algorithm.

How many Patriots, Iron Domes, or AEGIS Ashore systems to protect the top 33%?

Amazing and excellent visualization.

From when is this data? Tegel Airport doesn’t exist anymore.

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It's sadly not very up to date, the flight data is up to 2014 and the airport data up to 2019

Thank you!

Very Nice but Im missing Singapore?

Changi, near the label for Bangkok

Changi, toward the left.

There’s a few that don’t have the location in the airport name which can be confusing. E.g. Kingsford Smith (Sydney, Australia)

I’m confused as to why you wouldn’t make this geographical. What is the benefit in displaying the information this way?

Right? It took me a second wondering why Brisbane and Melbourne were there but Sydney nowhere to be found… this is some r/DataIsUgly right here

It would show how ridiculously close the four biggest airports are and the many lines between them. However, I'm confused by de gaulle on top, with schiphol right as well. I'd at least have swapped them around...

Better visualization of centrality, both high and low, and communities

If the project isn't over yet I think also having size (or color) equal to ranking: betweenness would be really helpful, as it measures how much that airport is needed to connect different locations in the world through connecting flights

P.s. Also you just need to push a button to calculate it, so pretty ez

P.p.s. Also modularity as color and then check how good of a representation of continents the components are

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Interesting, but it makes my brain cramp that they're not geographically distributed, at least somewhat.

It would also be fairly interesting to group airports together by city where relevant. Heathrow is just one of London's 6 different airports for example, so I'd be curious to see a similar figure with places like London depicted as a unified node.

The non-map map is confusing to read, but there's nonetheless some very interesting data here. I wasn't aware that Berlin Schönefeld had less traffic than Hamburg, and Oslo had more traffic than both. How odd. And little Keflavik is really the odd one out.

This graphic is wrong. Biggest airports in the world is Atlanta, USA. Frankfurt ist not even in the top 10.

It is in the wing sub. Better r/dataisugly

OP says the sizes of the circles are scaled based on the number of flights between the top 200 airports.

Atlanta is the largest airport by number of passengers, but the majority of that comes from domestic flights, i.e., many connections to smaller airports.

If this has the 200 largest airports, where is ATL (Hartsfield-Jackson)? That's the world's largest and I don't see it here.

It should still be listed here though, just not a big circle. I don't see it anywhere.

It's listed as "Hartsfield-Jackson Int" in the top part of the map. Indeed, it's surprisingly small.

Chicago is the number 1 airport is the USA for international flights. Where is it?

Graphic is wrong.

It's in the middle of the American cluster, above Toronto. The reason why it's not that prominent is that the visualisation is based on numbers of connecting flights, and ATL is apparently not ranked that highly there (see also https://simpleflying.com/most-well-connected-airports-in-the-world/)

"O'Hare International" between Los Angeles and JFK.

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Here you go for centrality and here you go for modularity! I had to rerun the algorithm because my Gephi project didn't save correctly for some reason, that's why the layout is different. Thank you for the ideas!

Edit: Just realised that Gephi coloured Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle in with America... I wonder what the British and the French would think about that.

I feel you for Gephi not saving correctly ahahah, have used it just for a project but every time I reopened a project I used filters on I had errors and had to restart all over again 🙃

Pretty interesting for those being put in the mainly American component

This map seems really misleading, or a bad way to display airport data, as it would suggest Heathrow and Frankfurt and De Gaulle are the airport heavyweights when they’re relatively small compared to many US and Chinese airports.

Isn’t Atlanta Georgia the busiest airport in the world?

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Perhaps colorize the airport names by continent. That might illustrate some geography without moving the cities.

Go bigger. do it with ALL international airports

I actually made Gephi group the airport together based on what connections they have. That mostly ended up grouping them into continents... apart from Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle, which are grouped in together with the Americans. Oops.

Really struggling with this concept as well. Maybe there needs to be a volume map, too?

Isn’t Atlanta the busiest airport?

Ignoring the US apparently? No ORD, JFK, ATL, LAX, etc.

Looking at this, it seems that Europe is still the center of the world. North America and East Asia are still very border area compared to Europe.

Which software did you use to make this?

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