Patterning Flight Patterns

In a huge airport, visualization of flight patterns takes place across several monitors, each displaying several hundred lines of incoming and outgoing flight patterns. A single line represents a single flight and the text of the line gives flight number, time of arrival, gate, etc. It's ugly and hard to find your flight, especially since organization tends to be across different airlines (Continental, JetBlue, etc) instead of a single organization based on time.

In my first sketch, I wanted to create a timeline that showed all incoming and outgoing flights, centered around their time of arrival/departure. I used a timeline, an easily recognizible concept from elementary school, in order to provide a quick, understandable, relative way of organizing flights at the highest level. I used color to indiciate on-time or late flights (Green means 'go' - everything is on time. Red is 'stop' - something is not on time!). However, once I realized that arrived flights also needed to be shown, I ended up with a huge list of arrived flights on one side and I started to realize this approach wouldn't scale well. A large airport, like Newark, has hundreds of flights incoming and outgoing. A simple timeline approach wouldn't work very well when you have 25 or 30 flights stacking up on each other.

My second approach sticks with the timeline approach, but partitions the timeline into tables. Each table represents a 30-minute block, and only the time from current to an hour in the future have explicit details shown. This gives the user a quick, at-a-glance access to more current events, but more distant events are still relevant. A few scenario outlines:
* You arrive at the airport 3 hours before your flight departs. You look at the screen, at the time when your flight is scheduled to leave. Because it's so far in the future, the exact departure time is not shown, but the flight is green, which means "on time".
* You arrive at the airport to pick up a family member coming in from LAX after the flight was supposed to have arrived. You look at the timeslot they were supposed to arrive in, and see it is red and marked (+1:30), signalling it is an hour and 30 minutes late.
* As your flight departure time nears, you glance at the screen. You see your flight is red, showing the adjusted time it will leave as well as the amount of time it has been delayed.

Dynamic controls would include a lensing effect, so the user can find the specific flight that interests them and mouseover to get more information. Filtering is pretty obvious - filter by airline, arrival/departure time, location/destination, late flights, all flights into a specific gate, etc.