The Map With No Borders

The science

Comprehensive data on who flies where is famously hard to get – airlines guard it closely. So a team led by Zhuojie Huang at the University of Florida built an open model of it, published in PLoS ONE. Using publicly available flight schedules, city populations and local GDP, they estimated passenger flows between every airport serving a city of more than 100,000 people, reachable within two transfers. The result was one of the first open-access maps of how humanity actually moves through the air.

The researchers weren't making art – their model was built to study how epidemics travel along air routes, and how economics shapes traffic. But the underlying pattern turned out to be strikingly beautiful.

How we turned it into a print

We drew each long-distance route as a single fine line. There are no coastlines and no borders on this map – yet when thousands of routes overlap, every continent appears on its own. Every landmass, that is, except Antarctica, which has no scheduled long-distance service and stays invisible. Follow the brightest knots and you find the hubs that hold global aviation together: London, Dubai, Singapore, New York, Frankfurt.

The print

Our most-reviewed design, The World as Flight Routes belongs to the Minimal collection and the Maps for Travel Lovers collection. Printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm. Data source: Huang et al., An Open-Access Modeled Passenger Flow Matrix for the Global Air Network, PLoS ONE.