Why?

I find global flight path maps mesmerizing. In a single image these maps present the vastness of our interconnected civilization on a global scale. These maps are by no means rare. However, they can be a fun programing exercise to generate.

Where to get flight data?

OpenFlights.org has assembled several databases relate to air travel. Their database on air routes and airports provided the necessary information to determine flight paths. The database contains nearly 60,000 routes from 3200 airports.

Flight paths were colored based on the departure continent. To correlate the departure airport, with a depature continent, an ISO-3166 database was utilized.

The aforementioned datasets were assembled as MATLAB Tables for use by the plotting script.

The shapefile for the world map was obtained from ArcGIS.

How to calculate the flight path.

The great-circle is the shortest distance between any two points traveling along the surface of a sphere. The great-circle is defined as a circle centered on the centroid of the sphere and orientated such that the perimeter of the circle passes through the two locations. The arc defined by the great-circle provides the shortest travel route often used for long-distance air travel.

Algebraic formulas for calculating the great circle distance as well as latitude and longitude values of intermediate points along the arc can be found here: https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

A MATLAB function for calculating the great circle distance as well as intermediate points along the route is included at the bottom of this article.

The result

The map below shows the results of this exercise.