This Is What One Day In European Air Traffic Looks Like

On any given day in July, Europe sees about 30,000 flights in its airspace, each of which needs to be routed to, from, and around other areas.

To give that task a sense of scale, United Kingdom-based National Air Traffic Services has animated every single flight path into a two-minute long time-lapse. The material was collected from U.K. radar data from June 21, 2013 and European flight plan information from July 28, 2013, according to a release that accompanies the clip.

The result is an astounding tribute to the intricate dance directed by air traffic controllers on a daily basis. Corridors to and from North America and around Heathrow, for example, are particularly frenetic.

NATS jokes that, for most people, the "choreography ... is entirely unnoticed - it quite literally goes over their heads."

Europe 24 from NATS on Vimeo.