We’ve been having a bit of trouble with our map servers lately, so I’m delighted to announce that we’ve just switched to new and, hopefully, more stable ones today.

The default “political” blue-and-gray map is the same as it ever was, only it’s now hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).  OSGeo are also the folks behind the OpenLayers map system that powers the entire site, so please show your love on their Donations page.

The full-color geographical “world” map has been offline ever since NASA pulled the plug on their Blue Marble map server a few months back, but today it’s back courtesy of OpenGeo, another non-profit which, confusingly enough, is entirely separate from OSGeo.   If you haven’t seen this before, here’s how to activate it: click on the top right  icon, then choose “Base Layer > Geographical (OpenGeo)”, and the background of your OpenFlights map will now be the real world.  The two caveats are that 1) it’s considerably slower than the political map, since there’s so much more detail, and 2) OpenGeo’s map isn’t quite as high-res as the original, so you can’t zoom in all the way to the airport runways like you could previously.

Tiled and ready to go,
-j.