New York Flight Patterns

A lot of maps using CartoDB's Torque library come in for a bit of criticism. This can be especially true of the many animated Twitter maps created using Torque. Over the last week How News of #Ferguson Spread on Twitter got picked up by a lot of websites. It also picked up just as much criticism from geo-hipsters, a lot of whom weren't really sure about the value of the map.

However Torque can be a great way to visualize animated data on a map. Flights Over Queens has not gathered as much love (and hate) as the #Ferguson map but it is a great visualization of flight patterns over New York City.

The map animates flights on the evening of October 1st 2014 coming into and exiting JFK, LGA and EWR. The map also shows the flight paths of each of the evening's flights. The result is a rather beautiful map of flight patterns over Queens.