'Airspace rebooted' animation hits 500,000 viewings

Only a week after ITO World Ltd published an animation showing flight movements over Europe in the period after the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull the online plays have hit 500,000. We have had mentions in the online versions of the Economist, the Guardian and the Huffington Post and it was shown on Canada's Discovery television channel.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

The animation is based on information collected by volunteers of the FlightRadar24 project who use VHF receivers to gather data from transmission from commercial planes. The base mapping is from OpenStreetMap.

On 17 April 2010 there were virtually no flights:

By 18 April 2010 there were a few more:

By 19 April 2010 there were more flights over mainland Europe but still none from United Kingdom airports:

From 20 April 2010 flights were pretty much back to normal (note that there is still no data for much of France and for some other parts of Europe).

As well as our original animation which we released using a creative commons share -alike license there is now a version set to music and one with an ash cloud overlay.

ITO World are experts at transport data presentation and Open Data. We have produced an animation for Sir Tim Berners Lee which he showed at TED of edits to OpenStreetMap during 2009 and our 'OSM 2008: A Year of Edits' animation has been viewed 145,000 times online and shown at numerous conferences.

ITO have also been documenting the creative ways people used social media to get home after the flight disruptions as part of Ideas in Transit.