Commercial Aviation World Map

I’m currently reading Gordon Hempton’s book “Earth is a Solar Powered Jukebox”, which I am enjoying a lot. In it Hempton refers to a Creative Commons map of the world that shows “scheduled airline traffic around the world, circa June 2009. Contains 54317 routes, rendered at 25% transparency.” Here it is below:

World-airline-routemap-2009

By Jpatokal (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia CommonsI’ll often complain about noise from aeroplanes when I am out field recording, but last week I was fortunate enough to get a couple of hours of field recording done without any air traffic noise interruptions in the Merricumbene area between Araluen and Moruya in South Eastern New South Wales. This map shows just how lucky we are with regards to air traffic noise when compared to North America or Europe. Looking at the map, one might expect that you might almost always hear a plane in the sky wherever you are in Europe at any time of day.

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