By: Erin Quinn
Dubai International Airport (DXB) is the world’s busiest hub for international air travel. All 1,000+ daily flights heading to more than 240 destinations are visualized on this map built by the agency Prototype for DXB. Travelers can explore flight connections aided by smooth airplane marker animations, a subtle basemap, and interactive pop-ups that summarize traffic from every country.
Prototype built the map using open-source country data boundaries and layered on live lat/long coordinates from every airline’s flights. The resulting standalone map-module is constantly up to date (no refreshing needed) as it processes all of that data.
Graciela Nedelcheva on the Prototype team told us, “We were able to strip the map to the bare minimum and add our own customization on top of it, making the loading times very fast. There’s a lot of data handling and caching happening on the backend. Mapbox’s APIs helped us make the integration between the map and data seamless, and using Mapbox Studio made the actual map creation a breeze.”
This map is also displayed on kiosks around the airport used by the 200,000+ people who travel through DXB daily. Next time you pass through Dubai, let us know what you think using #BuiltWithMapbox.
Visualizing 1,000 flights a day at DXB was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.