It might look like modern art, but this mesmerising video is a visual representation of planes flying over London in 24 hours.
The air traffic control service Nats shared the beautiful animation to illustrate just how busy the UK skies really are.
According to Nats, this summers skies were the busiest on record, with over 736,800 commercial aircraft flying in UK airspace over the course of June, July and August.
Thats 5,683 more than the previous record set last year.
It marks six consecutive years of growth since traffic levels fell following the global financial crisis, Nats said.
The video shows around 5,000 planes flying around Londons five airports on August 7, and was created using radar data from the 24-hour period.
The record breaking summer was mirrored by high traffic levels across Europe, but with markedly better delay performance in the UK, Nats said.
Overall, for the year to the end of August, Nats said it handled just under a quarter of all air traffic in Europe, but contributed to just 2.6% total delays.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Juliet Kennedy, Nats Operations Director, said: It has been an incredibly busy summer, and our teams have done a fantastic job safely managing what have been unprecedented levels of air traffic.
Its been particularly pleasing to have done so without seeing the severity of capacity issues that have existed elsewhere in Europe.
Our investment in new technology, together with changes that were made to some of the airspace over the south east of England in 2016, has helped keep us ahead of demand, but that wont be the case for long as traffic continues to grow.
As an industry we are already planning for the next stage.
Advertisement
Advertisement
[contf]
[contfnew]
METRO
[contfnewc]
[contfnewc]