OpenFlights

News from OpenFlights, the site for flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing

Monthly Archives: July 2009


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Ahora disponible en español, agora disponível em português

OpenFlights has just launched two very important language versions:

  • Spanish (español), courtesy of Luis F Nueckel
  • Portuguese (português), courtesy of László de Miranda Pinto

A round of applause to our volunteers, and please do help spread the word by posting to blogs and aviation forums in these languages.

OpenFlights is already available in 11 languages spanning the globe, but there are still many others left.  Want to help us add another language? It’s easier than you think, just take a look at the instructions and let us know if you’re interested.

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In other news, the OpenFlights team will be going on summer vacation for the next few weeks and recording a few flights of their own, so responses may be a little less lightning-fast than usual.  We’ll be back in full force by mid-August.

Enjoy relaxing time,
-jani


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Route mapping improvements

Just a quick heads-up for a few route mapping improvements:

  • Airline maps now default to not showing codeshare flights, which makes them much clearer and faster to load and manipulate for most airlines.  If you do want to display codeshares as well, just toggle the Carrier filter from “XX-operated” to “XX and codeshares”.
  • Airlines without IATA codes and those deemed “inactive” (with no known routes and no flights in the past few years) no longer show up in Quick Search results, since there are no route maps for these and thus nothing to display.  (They are still accessible as usual from the flight editor though.)
  • The maps are no longer resized to fit when you change the airline filter, which makes switching between airlines quite a bit faster.

Two small bugs were also swatted:

  • Searches for airports with no known routes work again, so you can at least see where in the world it is.
  • Airports are now only ghosted if they are entirely codeshare destinations.

And one more known issue:

  • Currently OpenFlights does not distinguish between actual and codeshared routes when counting an airport’s routes, leading to some double-counting .  After some deliberation, I’ve decided to keep it this way, mostly due a limitation in the route data: there are quite a few cases where we know that airline X has a codeshare on a route, but we do not have the actual operating carrier’s data.  Filtering out codeshares would remove these from the map entirely, which would be — in my opinion — a larger problem than the incorrect count.

Any more bugs to fix or improvements you’d like to see?  Drop us a line.

Step by step,
-jani


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Airline route maps launched, metric distances available

Our recently released airport route maps have been a huge hit, so we’ve now followed through on our promise and released airline route maps as well: just enter your favorite airline’s name or IATA code in the Quick Search to get their route map. As an example, here’s Slovene national airline Adria Airways (JP):

But there’s more!

  • Filters are now implemented for airport route maps, so you can see where a given airline flies to from a given airport.  Just search for an airport, then choose Carrier from the Filter menu on the right.
  • If you choose an airline map, or an airport-filtered-by-airline map, codeshare flights are now indicated with dotted lines to show that the airline does not “really” fly on that route.  (Still on the to-do list: the ability to hide codeshare destinations.)

The second new feature launched today has been our most requested feature for a while now: the ability to display distances in kilometers as well as miles.  New users can select their preference when creating an account, while existing users can go to Settings to change to kilometers if they wish.  If enabled, the main map statistics, the “Analyze” and “Top 10” statistics and “List flights” all display kilometers; however, flight distances in the flight editor are still always in miles.

With this, OpenFlights will now be entering a feature freeze in preparation for the OpenFlights Epsilon release targeted for the end of August.  The goals of Epsilon are:

  1. Shake out bugs and usability quirks to create a solid, reliable, and easy-to-use website
  2. Improve airport, airline and route database quality
  3. Make installing your own copy of OpenFlights easier by modularizing and documenting the OpenFlights software base

You can do your part by reporting any bugs you encounter.  Translators, we’ve added some new strings to OpenFlights, so your assistance in updating them would be appreciated.

Onward to the Epsilon,
-jani


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German, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish are here!

Today, I have the great pleasure of almost doubling the number of languages supported by OpenFlights.  Now launched are:

A round of applause to our volunteers, and please do help spread the word by posting to aviation forums in these languages.  Corrections and additions to the existing translations are also welcome, the Polish translation in particular is still a little incomplete.

But the job is not over yet, we’re always looking for new languages to add.  Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese or Arabic, anyone?  As a reminder, translation is quick, easy and non-technical, and instructions can be found here.

And a minor note: we’ve changed a few icons in the interface to make them clearer.  Now you can click on the top right corner  for map options, or the lower right corner for the minimap control.

Paskutinieji pridėti skrydžiai,
-jani