On Christmas morning, 2025, Anthropic sent an unexpected Christmas present: double usage limits on its Claude AI models. The email announcing the extra model time offered several suggestions for using it. One suggestion was to use the holiday time to build a creative project.

Don’t mind if I do.

So combined two recent fascinations for me: Animating data visualizations and the growth of Turkish Airlines’ IST hub. You can see where we’re going with this.

Turkish Airlines has been on a tear for the past two decades. While we’ve shown the airline's growth from a capacity perspective, the geographic breadth of that growth is most impressive. For months, I’ve wanted to combine the two dimensions of latitude and longitude with the third dimension of time - showing not only which Turkish routes were added and dropped, but the cadence of their arrival and departure.

For instance, it’s difficult to really capture the shift from Turkish as an Europe-to-Asia-focused airline to a balanced long-haul carrier spanning the globe without introducing the dimension of time.

The massive changes that arrived in 2011 and 2012 are put into context by the few lines that appear in the years prior. The impacts of the pandemic show routes that originally operated in 2020, but were dropped by 2021, only to be slowly added back. Or, perhaps the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, highlighted by the Russian markets highlighted in red as they retreat back into the hub.

I have witnessed hundreds of different uses of AI, most of which include someone swearing they’ve built the next whatever. Barely an hour goes by without an email pitch promising this company’s AI model can write entire books, or that model can replace analysts, or how (insert any skillset here) will be replaced entirely by AI.

But Anthropic’s gift came at the right time, with the right reminder: learn something new and be creative. The project reinforced the single greatest use of AI: making humans better. New skills were learned at a rate I once thought impossible.

My time spent with Claude Code over the holidays was enough for my wife to ask if I would eventually leave her for Claude.

I’m pretty sure she’s joking.

Congratulations to Turkish Airlines and to Istanbul's decades of growth.

Pop Quiz:

Which North American airline operated the most seats to IST in 2025?

(Hint, look closely at the picture below)

Ready for the answer? 

Research published this week

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