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Flights flows in/out of Europe

Explore IFR flights flows between Eurocontrol Member States and other regions/countries for the period 2001 - 2015.
Click on a region to discover flows country-by-country. Hover on a region, country or flow in order to get the number of movements.

A circular plot of the flows internal to Eurocontrol Member States is available as a separate study.

by Enrico Spinielli (data processing and visualization) & Muriel Tholome (raw data provision)
   

Estimating extra-European flight flows

The flows above are about the extra-European flights for the years 2001-2015 which do not originate and arrive in one of the Eurocontrol member States' airports: internal flight flows have been filtered out because their much bigger size would otherwise mask the extra-European ones.
Furthermore military and helicopters flights have been taken out, as well as the flights whose departing (arriving) aerodrome is unknown (this last point looks like to be unconceaveable but it happens: flight plans have to be valid within its area of responsability for the Network Manager to accept them...)
This last set of filtered out flights do amount to very low figures and do not distort the overall distribution of the flows.
Finally, in order to clean the visualization and reduce the number of very small flows we have decided to show only the countries with flows of at least 5 flights per day.

Note that in/out flows are not typically balanced. This is partially due to the filtering we performed, the sampling temporal window used (1 calendar year), multi-lag flights,...

The grouping into regions is arbitrary. We have kept all Eurocontrol member States under the same group irrespective of their accession date.
The regions are defined as follows:

Eurocontrol
Eurocontrol member States (Albania, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey, Ukraine and United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) plus Kosovo.
Middle East
definition as per Wikipedia minus Cyprus and Turkey which are grouped under Eurocontrol: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
America
Northern, Central and Southern America countries plus Greenland and Iceland.
Africa
All countries in the continent but Egypt which is included in Middle East.
Asia
all the rest of the world.

NOTE

This is a preliminary study.

Bear with us: we are working on cleaning the data, refining our choices for the visualization and publishing a paper with our findings.
Here is a list of things we want to tackle: color palette for colorblind readers (5-10% of males for many populations for red-green); similar colors for countries in the same region (thanks to Dr Sander for the suggestion); ordering regions similarly to their geographical position, i.e. Eurocontrol up (North), the on the right Asia (East), then Middle East ...

A further note of caution: the flows have been calculated from the archived flights from Eurocontrol's Network Manager. Historically different countries have joined Eurocontrol and the service of NM (once called CFMU) at different moments, so expecially for the early years in the diagram above we could have little flows for a country just because it was not yet serviced by CFMU/NM. This is the price we decided to pay to keep a fixed set of countries for the Eurocontrol "region".

We would really appreciate any feedbacks and/or comments to improve or appreciate ;-) our work.

Further information on circular plots

Nikola Sander, Guy J. Abel & Ramon Bauer. Global Flow of People.

Contact

About the flight flows circular plots:
enrico.spinielli@eurocontrol.int

About the data:
enrico.spinielli@eurocontrol.int
muriel.tholome@eurocontrol.int

Credits

Provided by Performance Review Unit logo Eurocontrol logo

Many thanks to all Eurocontrol collegues for the decades spent in setting up the institutional and operational links with so many countries in and out of Europe, for managing the flows and capacities (Network Manager), controlling flights (MUAC), and for all other pre- (i.e. Research and SESAR) and post-ops (i.e. CRCO, STATFOR, CODA, ...) activities so necessary to help European aviation aiming at performing better and better.

Thanks to Wittgenstein Centre , Vienna Institute of Demography for having made their work publicly available (even in source code! Which allowed us to propose little contributions.)

Circular plot library coded by Null2 and inspired by Martin Krzywinski's Circos and Mike Bostock’s D3.js library.

Special thanks

All this work would have not been possible without the friendly support of many colleagues from the PRU. Essential too, of course, is PRU management permission to let us explore new avenues, letting us try and fail and enjoy and eventually get something useful out of it all. This is only the start!



How to read the plot

How to read the plot

help

Origins and destinations are represented by the circle’s segments. Each region/country is assigned a colour. Flows have the same colour as their origin and the width indicates their size. The direction of the flow is also shown by the gap between flow and country/region: small gap indicates origin; large gap indicates destination. Click on a segment to switch between country and region view.

Switch between time periods using Ctrl and number keys (1,2,3,4); reset the plot using Ctrl and r; zoom in/out with Ctrl and +/-

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