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

So far OpenFlights has been all about mapping your own travels and seeing where others have been to, but today, we’ve taken a big step in making it your tool of choice for travel planning as well.   Now, you can click on any airport and see every single scheduled flight:

For easy access to this, we’ve added a Quick search widget, shown expanded above but normally hiding in the bottom-right corner under the icon.  Here’s how to use it, in two easy steps:

1. Enter the airport name, city or IATA code in the box.  OpenFlights will automatically suggest matches as you type, and if the airport is already shown on the map, OpenFlights will pop it up.
2. Once you’ve entered a valid name, the Search button becomes active.  If you click on this, OpenFlights will load a route map showing all flights from that airport.

But there’s more!  In the popup for every airport, there’s now a Routes button, which you can also use to see the map.  If you click on the List button for the mapped airport (via popup or the top left corner), you’ll get a list of all flights operating from there; if you click on that button for another airport, you’ll get a list of all airlines connecting the two, even including codeshares.

In these route listings, you’ll see little buttons, which will take you to flight booking site Kayak.com with a preloaded search for the airports and airline that you have selected.  Buy your ticket from here, and OpenFlights get a little commission; just another little way to help support the site.

So, with the good stuff out of the way, it’s time to confess to a few things that we can’t do, at least not yet.

• The route map covers routes, not schedules.  We don’t know exact flight days, times or route numbers; however, click through to Kayak, and it can usually tell you.
• The route map covers non-stop flights only.  Singapore Airlines flies SIN-ICN-SFO, but if you click on SIN, you’ll only see the first leg.
• The route map does not support route finding.  If there’s no direct connection, we can’t find it for you… yet.
• Route maps are offered per airport, not per airline (although this is on the to-do list).
• Filters, Analyze, Top 10 etc don’t work on route maps (yet?).  If you try to use them, it will just show you the data for your flights.

Last but by no means least, our thanks to our colleagues at Airline Route Mapper; without their amazing 53,000-route data file, this would never have been possible.

Routing for victory,
-jani

Some of our users have been asking for a way to add OpenFlights stats to their websites, blogs or forum signatures.  Wait no longer, banners are now here!  Here’s mine:

Banner contents update automatically every hour.  They can be used with HTML markup (used by web and blog pages):

<a href='http://openflights.org/user/yourname' target='_blank'><img src='http://openflights.org/banner/yourname.png' width=400 height=70></a>

With PHPbb markup (for bulletin boards):

[url=http://openflights.org/user/yourname]
[img]http://openflights.org/banner/yourname.png[/img][/url]

Or as a simple hotlinked image:

http://openflights.org/banner/yourname.png

In all the three cases above, substitute in your OpenFlights username for “yourname”.  Easier yet, just login to your OpenFlights account and click Settings, and it will generate the markup for you.

Anything else you’d like to see in a banner?  Smaller, larger, more data?  Let us know.

Flying the flag,
-jani