I dug through my flight tickets and booking confirmations to find out how much CO₂ I’ve contributed to our atmosphere. A journey through data, memories, and uncomfortable truths.
Flight Footprint is a personal data-visualization project from my Information Design course at Hochschule München. It turns my own flight history from 2024 and 2025 into an interactive web experience: 25 flights, 44,138 kilometres and an estimated 7 tonnes of CO₂. Every trip was driven by something human, a long-distance relationship, family, or education, which makes the footprint feel personal rather than abstract.
“What’s the cost of staying connected?” The emissions behind staying close to the people and places that matter are real but invisible. The data that would make them concrete lived scattered across tickets and booking confirmations, and even once gathered, raw tonnes of CO₂ mean little without context or emotion. The challenge was to make a personal emissions total both legible and felt, without turning it into a lecture.
An interactive, scroll-driven web app, built in Svelte, that walks through the footprint from five angles: a 3D globe of every route, a 2D map from Munich, a timeline colour-coded by reason, a bar chart that sets my 7 tonnes against climate benchmarks, and a photo archive that gives the numbers a human face. Data was hand-collected from every ticket and emissions estimated with the ICAO methodology. The narrative moves from global scale to personal memory, keeping the data emotionally accessible while leaving the central question deliberately open.
Every leg from 2024 and 2025, hand-logged from tickets and booking confirmations.
Total distance flown, more than once around the planet.
Estimated emissions (ICAO method), roughly 3.5× a sustainable yearly budget.
The first thing you see is a rotating 3D globe with animated flight routes, built with Three.js and Threlte. My own routes glow in yellow while dimmed, simulated global connections sit behind them, making clear that my handful of flights is part of a far larger system. Animated points travel the arcs like planes, and you can grab and spin the globe yourself.
An animated SVG map draws every route as a curved line out of Munich, my pulsing home marker. White dots travel each line, and their speed and the line’s thickness both encode how often I flew it: fast and thick on the routes I took most, like Munich–London and back, slow and thin to the places I rarely reached. Hovering a route reveals a tooltip with its distance, number of flights and CO₂, and London dominates the map with 17 flights, the visual signature of a long-distance relationship.
A horizontal timeline answers when. Marker size scales with CO₂, so long-haul trips to Asia tower over short London hops, and colour encodes the reason: pink for the relationship, orange for family in Morocco, yellow for summer school in Shanghai and Taipei, turquoise for a holiday in Malta. 2024 was purely relationship flights; 2025 opens up into family, education and travel.
A horizontal bar chart sets my 7 tonnes against the benchmarks: the Paris goal of 2 t per person, the global average of 4.7 t, Germany’s 11 t total and its 2 t from flights alone. One overlong bar makes it land instantly, my flight emissions overshoot a sustainable budget by about 3.5×. The bars fill on scroll to drive the point home.
The page closes with a 3D photo carousel (built with Swiper) of images and videos from the trips, giving the numbers a human face. The perspective pulls focus to the centre card; it supports keyboard and touch navigation, and videos autoplay when they come into focus.
The timeline and routes are colour-coded by the reason behind each trip, the emotional key that runs through the whole story.
Svelte
Three.js
Vite