If Christmas travel chaos does your head in, best not look at this timelapse map of the flights set to take to the skies this festive season.
Nearly 70 million people around the world will catch nearly half a million flights between December 21 and 25, according to the map, created by the UK’s Buyagift using data from air travel intelligence company OAG Aviation.
December 23 (Christmas Eve eve) is set to be the busiest day for air travel, with more than 15 million people catching nearly 100,000 flights.
Christmas Eve will be almost as hectic with 13.8 million travellers, while 13.3 million are set to fly out on December 21. More than 12.5 million will take off on Christmas Day itself.
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The US is set to be the busiest country for air travel over the period with 118,071 departures and 118,844 arrivals.
China sits in second place with 53,704 departures and 52,037 arrivals.
They are followed by India, Indonesia, Canada, Japan and Brazil. If you hate travelling when it’s busy, don’t worry: New Zealand doesn’t make the top 10.
The busiest cities will be New York, Chicago, London, Atlanta, Dallas and Shanghai, followed by Moscow, Paris, Bangkok and Los Angeles.
Chicago O’Hare International is set to be the busiest airport, followed by Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Los Angeles International and Dallas, Denver, Beijing, Jakarta, Charlotte, Houston, Delhi and New York’s JFK airports.
Disappointingly, flights to and from New Zealand are not shown on the map.
Seems PM Jacinda Ardern and Rhys Darby still have work to do on their #getnewzealandonthemap campaign.