While carrying out our own mapping project, we also care for the interactive maps made by others. Thus, we compiled the list of the maps that amazed us last week.

1. Live aircraft tracking by Casper: http://casper.frontier.nl/

Casper map displays flight movements around Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam). The system provides lots of cool features and information about the flights:

• Flight-related data (altitude, speed, aircraft) is displayed in real time ;
• The night can be distinguished from the day on the map;
• It is possible to show flights for any day on the map by selecting a date from the calendar (Replay).
• There is a cool feature that enables making the planes move up to 100 times faster on the map ;

Very impressive tool !

2. City Distance Calculator : http://www.distancefromto.net/

This tool measures the distance between two cities or locations and displays the route on the map. To calculate the distance between 2 cities or places you need to type city or location name or just drag the points to desired location!
Really nice and useful tool!

3. Tracking the Nation’s Bank Failures: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/info-Failed_Banks-sort.html

This beautiful map of U.S. bank failures, since the beginning of 2008, was built by the Wall Street Journal. All data sets are detailed and well presented. The map offers impressive graphics. And the round markers are perfect to illustrate the bank failure problem.

We were very pleased to discover these interesting and useful maps and hope you’ll appreciate them too!