Thanksgiving Flight Patterns

Thanksgiving Flight Patterns is a cool animated, interactive data visualization from the NY Times TheUpshot that looks at where people traveled to for the Thanksgiving holiday last week. On the interactive version on the NY Times site, you can hover over any included city to see only those connections. There was a huge surge of people headed to Florida!

Thanksgiving is known as a time to return home to family, with the holiday calling to mind images of grandmother’s house. But for many Americans, it’s also now a chance to go on vacation.

This week, Florida will see a surge in the number of people arriving by plane. Las Vegas is another popular destination. Much more than is commonly realized, Thanksgiving is a time to seek out sun (and gambling), in addition to (or possibly instead of) catching up with loved ones.

These conclusions emerge from The Upshot’s analysis of search data from Google Flights. In all, more than 3.6 million Americans — or slightly more than 1 percent of the country’s population — are expected to take a flight for Thanksgiving.

I really like the design choice to change the colors at both ends of each line. It really helps to see the traffic departing a city in comparison to the traffic arriving. 

I think the animation of the dots moving along the flight paths in the interactive version was unnecessary.