The World as a Honeycomb of Airports

The science

This map is built from the location of every airport on Earth, drawn from open aviation databases – airport GPS codes compiled from OurAirports and the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, alongside data from the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization.

The first airport opened barely a century ago. Since then, aviation has knitted the world together: today more than 58 million passengers and vast volumes of freight move by air each year.

How we turned it into a print

Rather than plotting dots, we expressed airport density through hexagons: the larger the hexagon, the more airports packed into that area. The result is a strikingly different way of seeing aviation – the dense honeycomb of the United States and Europe against the sparse cells of the world's emptier regions.

The print

From our Minimal collection and Maps for Travel Lovers, The World as Airport Density is printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm. Data source: OurAirports, DAFIF (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), ICAO.