As someone with generalized anxiety and a fear of flying, the statistics regarding the relative safety of airplane travel are only marginally helpful to me. Instead of focusing on the fact that the odds of being killed in flight are one in 11 million, I tend to focus on the “Plus Three / Minus Eight” rule — which describes the fact that takeoffs and landings, especially landings, are the most dangerous time of each flight.
For me, just the knowledge that I am below ten thousand feet in an airplane is anxiety-producing. Sitting in a window seat, near the wing, helps to mitigate my anxiety. In 2016, I discovered that putting my mind to work creating time-lapse photographs puts me in control of something and gives me something to concentrate on besides my irrational thoughts of crashing.
Call it art therapy if you’d like — or just enjoy the miracle of aviation engineering captured through modern photographic technology.
The Recordings
Each frame is a still from a takeoff or a landing — the sky, the wing, the ground coming up to meet it. Newest first; hover to preview, click to watch.
The Record
Every recording is logged the way an instrument would log it: a date, an origin, a destination, a phase of flight. Plotted together, over a decade of anxious minutes becomes a map of where I’ve been.
Hover a dot for detail · click any dot to watch that recording. Gaps are real: flights with no window seat, failed recordings, and the near-total absence of usable night footage all leave the record blank.
This is an ongoing project. Whenever I fly, I try for a window seat near the wing and I try to record the climb and the descent; it doesn’t always work. New flights are added in batches as they’re recorded and cataloged.
// The complete archive to date — every recording, cataloged.
// Videos hosted on Vimeo · showcase 5479299.
// One data source drives the whole page: add a flight, everything updates.
// Read about the process — ten years of footage, one week to finally show it ↗
A note on the weather tags
I got curious whether the skies I flew through were really as fraught as they felt, so I used each video’s metadata to pull the historical airport weather for every takeoff and landing. And it made sense to sort it the way pilots do: by how far you can see and how low the clouds sit.
It turns out most are clear VFR — which, true to form, I find only slightly reassuring.
Conditions from historical airport weather (METAR), matched to each flight by time and place.