I am somewhat of an aviation geek. Since I was young, I enjoyed watching planes take off and land. To me, airplanes are an extraordinary accomplishment in engineering.

I decided it would be a fun data visualization challenge to depict the route maps for every commercial airport and airline. There are of course existing tools that already do this, including openflights.org and flightmapper.net, but I wanted to make one of my own.

The primary tools I used to build this interactive map were D3.js, Mapbox, Leaflet, JavaScript and jQuery. The map also features arc.js and typeahead.js.

Data came from many sources, wherever I could find the necessary information. That included Wikipedia, official airport websites, official airline websites, iata.org, and openflights.org. I intend to use this tool to show the most current route maps for every commercial airline; however, due to the constantly changing schedules of airports and the airlines that serve them, data is prone to be out-of-date or incomplete.