Hi Reinhold -

As long as you have the coordinates of points on the flight route, you can plot them - so yes, no problem with curves.

I've attached a sample showing the paths of storms from our Visual Gallery. You'll see that all it's plotting is Lat & Long (on Rows and Columns) by Date (on the Path shelf) .

Hope this helps!

You couldn't have curved routes without feeding Tableau a path with all of the points the curve goes through. While doable, probably not feasible. If this is a must have, you may get better results in a data visualization language.

Don't know about your second point - maybe another dimension on a dual axis (you can do this with maps as well) and multiple mark types?

Hi Reinhold

I think you are looking to create great arcs like in this post? This is something Urban Mapping, Tableau's mapping provider supports.

ian

I can't help with the curved lines, for the multiple mark labels, you can use a table calculation that would look something like:

IF FIRST()==0 THEN

     WINDOW_MAX(MAX([airport]), 0, IIF(FIRST()==0,LAST(),0))

END

Exactly how it will look will depend on your data, the arrangement of pills in the view, etc. This will return only one value and Null for everything else, so it will only draw the one label.

The no lines crossing each other means that Tableau will not work for you. The Urban Mapping option for curved lines would be great, but I can't imagine that they will produce non-crossing lines. I would guess you are trying to get to something like this:

These will be hand drawn in Illustrator or some other graphics package. Your example does not use great arcs; there is some sort of calculation going on  to produce ever larger circles for each route.

1) Is there a way to have not straight lines between two points on a map but curved lines as on other flight route maps and display them so that all lines are visible ?

As others have mentioned, Mapfluence can draw great arcs with a custom TMS file in Tableau.

2) Of course origin or destination of flight routes can occur multiple times on one map. How could I influence which airport label is displayed and which is not to avoid a map like the one attached

Mapfluence gives you the ability to query "across columns", meaning that a query could be built specifying that you only want airport labels shown containing certain attributes (think airplane types, codeshare partner types, etc). You could also color the lines on the map based on those attributes. Additionally, Mapfluence has the ability to exclude specific data while visualizing - so if you only wanted unique segments, you could do that. Mapfluence's query language is very SQL-like.

For example, here's a quick map using random sample data I just made using color and thickness to represent some attributes (passenger volume and flight frequency) using unique segments.

Yes, this is possible.

LHX to LHR, Great Circle using WGS 84 Mercator Projection / Data pre-processed using Vincenty Formula.

You don't even need path order.

OpenFlights.org data coming soon.

Some progress, pre-processed in R.  Thanks to Flowing Data for the tutorial, enhanced it slightly for antipodean routes.

Next, Outputting a Tableau-readable CSV for multiple paths...

Here's a final result.

Output PNG added Message was edited by: Allan Walker

Test Demo available here

I've limited it to the first 50,000 rows, as the total file (without joins) is 13,000,000 rows.

Note - there is an obvious error in the data (not the map), let me know if you can work it out.

Next up, creating the TDE, and joining over to Airline, Destination Airport & Equipment Type.  Done. 

Hi Reinhold.

I'll do a blog post soon (hopefully this week) on how I achieved this.

Best Regards,

Allan

Great work, Allan!