ONE HOUR APART

The corridor

There is a line in the sky between Changi and Tan Son Nhat. It is 1,090 kilometres long and it is almost never empty. Every aircraft below is a real aircraft, transmitting right now, inside 220 km of that line. The map behind everything is the real coastline of Southeast Asia. Nothing here is decorative.

live ADS-B · refreshed every 30s · positions dead-reckoned in between

Where the map stops

ADS-B is not radar. It is a volunteer network of people with aerials on their roofs, and the South China Sea has nobody on it. So the tracking fades somewhere out past the Malaysian coast and the rest of the flight — the half that actually approaches her — goes unwatched. — of this corridor is dark right now. The planes do not disappear. We just stop being able to see them.

Is it raining on her?

The most honest way to ask how someone is, is to ask the sky above them. These two readings come from the actual atmosphere over the two cities, taken minutes ago.

reading the sky…

Shared daylight

Two cities, one hour apart, but the sun does not care about time zones. This is today, in real solar terms: the light Eugene gets, the light Linh gets, and the overlap — the part of the day you are both awake under the same star.

computing sunlight…

The distance, in units that actually mean something