flight pattern article in Discover magazine

I was rereading my new issue of Discover and there was an article on the work of a gentleman named Aaron Koblin (page 22). He took flight data from FAA for a 28 hour timeframe and plotted it.

The article makes mention of the fact that there are flights that seem to begin and end a couple of hundred miles off of California where there is nothing but ocean. It was only a paragraph about it, but it caught my attention. So I found his website and it has quicktime videos showing the data graphed in different ways. One video shows a detail area of Hawaii and California, and there does seem to be flights arriving and departing the area mentioned off the coast.

I tried to look at Google maps and view the Video side by side to see the reason for data. Since I don't leave in the west coast maybe someone here has an explanation for the flight data?

Here is the website and the link to the videos.

www.aaronkoblin.com
users.design.ucla.edu...

Knowing which video you're referring to would be helpful because some are animations based on information from raw data. If you're talking about raw radar return data the reason it appears aircraft are arriving and departing areas in the ocean is because there is no radar coverage beyond a couple hundred miles from the coast.

The picture was located in the Discover article. The video I was refering to was is here.

users.design.ucla.edu...

I am not sure I undestand your point about the radar coverage.

According to the article the data is latitude, longitude, and altitude data recorded by the FAA.

I think it's important to understand that these videos are simply an "artist's rendering" for the purpose of illustrating the amount and variation of air traffic over a 24 hour period of time. For some reason, he chose to have the flight patterns for some of these aircraft fade away rather than continue them into the already light soaked scene over the US. This article explains a little of this where it states that he downloaded plots of aircraft and then connected the dots for effect.

The patterns that seem to disppear over the ocean do that because he made these videos that way. Those patterns aren't based on actual radar plots.

[edit on 15-1-2007 by Freedom_for_sum]

It could be aircraft carrier training. Thats my best guess. .

Yes I thought it my be some flying boat or aircraft carrier etc. I was curious because DIscover magazine pointed it out as odd, and the FAA said it was a computer/data glitch.