No Planes Over Pakistan

FlightRadar24 has become the go-to source for mappers searching for flight data, particularly when something happens to disrupt air traffic around the world. Last month the New York Times used data from FlightRadar24 to visualize the grounding of Boeing 737's around the world after the crash of Flight 302. Now Reuters has used data from the same source to visualize How India-Pakistan tensions have disrupted air travel.

During the early hours of February 26 Indian warplanes flew into the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan and dropped a number of bombs in the vicinity of the town of Balakot. India claimed that they had made a preemptive strike against a terrorist training camp. A claim which Pakistan disputes, saying that the bombs were dropped in an uninhabited area. The day after the Indian airstrike Pakistan cancelled all commercial flights and closed its airspace.

Reuters has used data from FlightRadar24 to create a number of maps showing how air travel in the region has been disrupted by Pakistan's closure of its airspace. These mapped visualizations include a series of small maps showing how a number of planes had to divert around Pakistan on the day that the airspace closure was announced. It also includes a larger map which provides a snapshot of flights on February 27, with a big absence of flights over Pakistan. A third map shows the flight paths of planes from April 3-9, most of them skirting around the southern tip of Pakistan.