Long exposure photos of airline traffic - like the mapping of flights with GPS, except more glowing. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on May 18, 2011 - 21 comments

One Day On Earth - a vast repository of video captured from lexperiences around the world on the 10th of October, 2010.
A Day Of The World’s Air Traffic - visualisation of the world's air traffic in a single day in 2008. (Original source, in German, previously.)
A Day In The Life Of Social Media. [more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul on Jan 21, 2011 - 6 comments

A 24 hour observation of all of the large aircraft flights in the world, condensed down to just over a minute. Similar videos are created by NASA's Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool (or FACET), like this one of a day in the life of air traffic over the United States.
posted by gman on Jan 4, 2011 - 14 comments

On 1 July 2002 at 21:35:32 hrs a collision between a Tupolev TU154M, which was on a flight from Moscow/Russia to Barcelona/ Spain, and a Boeing B757-200, on a flight from Bergamo/Italy to Brussels/ Belgium, occurred north of the city of Ueberlingen (Lake of Constance). Investigation Report as of May 2004, PDF. Very detailed, intelligibly written.

71 people were killed in one of Europe's worst peacetime air accidents. The report comes the the conclusion that human error was the main cause. The TCAS system (PDF) which should have prevented the collision worked, but the Tupolew crew followed the ATC instructions. It turned out that the air traffic controller missed a key warning on his radar screen in one of a chain of errors. ATCs from nearby airports realized what was going on but weren't able to contact the responsible Skyguide controller because the telephone network did not work: the main telephone line was switched off because of work being done on the telephone network, and the collision warning system was temporarily shut down for maintenance.
The ATC in charge was stabbed to death in February 2004 by a Russian man who lost his wife, son and daughter in the plane crash.
posted by tcp on Jul 1, 2004 - 9 comments

"The Tapes" -- plane radio traffic on 9/11. (NYTimes link, registration required.) It would almost be refreshing to read something like this -- hard facts and timelines, actual quotes instead of vague inferences -- were it not for the content of those quotes, which is chilling. Very much worth a read, however.
posted by precipice on Oct 15, 2001 - 9 comments