Yesterday afternoon, US Airways Flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River after bird strikes on both engines shortly following takeoff. The New York Times has a slick infographic/animation of the time line of events. If you want to get complete understanding of what happened, check it out:
Tracking US Airways Flight 1549 – New York Times
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a 3d animation worth? At least an order of magnitude more, I’d wager. I spent about 1 minute reviewing this excellent piece of information design. I now have a far better understanding of the sequence of events, especially the time and space they occured in, than reading any thousand word story or viewing any photograph could have given me.