I'm curious about one thing: Are these the <i>actual</i> flight paths of planes, or are they lines drawn between destinations?<p>e.g. I thought that flights over the Atlantic travel via different routes depending on whether they are going east or west, to take advantage of the prevailing winds. Or maybe they just alter their height? Does anyone know?<p>A quick bit of web searching doesn't seem to give the answer to the data on these pictures; apparently they are from <a href="http://openflights.org/" rel="nofollow">http://openflights.org/</a> but it's not clear if that data is 'just' lines between destinations or the actual waypoints of the planes.
Very similar to Aaron Koblin's work visualising the same thing from 2005: <a href="http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/</a>