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Flights flows within Europe

Explore IFR flights flows between Eurocontrol Member States grouped as per STATFOR regions 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 to/from Eurocontrol Member States is available as a separate study.

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

   

Estimating intra-European flight flows

The flows above are about the intra-European flights for the years 2001-2015, i.e. the ones that originate and arrive in one of the Eurocontrol member States' airports.

For the grouping of countries into regions we have adopted the ESRA 08 classification from Eurocontrol/STAFTOR (see Fig. 35 page 46 of " EUROCONTROL Forecast of Annual Number of IFR Flights (2015 - 2021) September 2015").
The regions are defined as follows:

ESRA North-West
EB (Belgium), ED (Germany - civil), EF (Finland), EG (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), EH (Netherlands), EI (Ireland), EK (Denmark), EL (Luxemburg), EN (Norway), ES (Sweden), ET (Germany - military), LF (France), LN (Monaco), LO (Austria), LS (Switzerland.)
ESRA Mediterranean
GC (Spain - Canary Islands), LC (Cyprus), LE (Spain), LG (Greece), LI (Italy), LM (Malta), LP (Portugal - including the Azores and Madeira), LT (Turkey.)
ESRA East
BK (Kosovo), EP (Poland), LA (Albania), LB (Bulgaria), LD (Croatia), LH (Hungary), LJ (Slovenia), LK (Czech Republic), LQ (Bosnia and Herzegovina), LR (Romania), LU (Moldova), LW (The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedoni), LY (Gilbratar), LZ (Slovakia), UK (Ukraine.)
Other Europe (limited to Eurocontrol members)
EE (Estonia), EV (Latvia), EY (Lithuania), UD (Armenia), UG (Georgia.)

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. ESRA North-West at the top left, Middle East ESRA Mediterranean at the bottom...

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 various regions.

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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