Philipp Bock

To illustrate their investigation on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down in eastern Ukraine in July 2014, the non-profit Correctiv newsroom commissioned an interactive map of the flights over the area. The project was a co-operation with the German Spiegel magazine and the Dutch tabloid AD.

The visualisation uses flight data from Flightradar24 (with their kind permission) and a custom-designed map based on OpenStreetMap data. Users can move forward and backward in time by dragging the slider at the top.

Drawing (and erasing) the “contrails” while maintaining an acceptably smooth animation proved particularly challenging. To minimise the necessary drawing operations, several canvas elements were layered.