Today OpenFlights rolls out a very simple feature indeed: airport codes are now shown on the map, right next to each airport.  Better yet, if you happen to forget what “BHX” or “NTQ” stands for, just hover your mouse over the airport icon and it will pop up a label reminding you that they’re “Birmingham, United Kingdom” and “Wajima-Noto, Japan” respectively.

But wait, there’s more!  To speed things up a bit and reduce clutter on screen, we’ve also rolled out a funky feature called dynamic clustering.  In plain English, this means that if you’ve got a lot of airports smushed up into a small space, OpenFlights will now show only a single airport on your map.  There are two ways to know that there’s more here than meets the eye:

1. If one airport is more important than the others (has more flights), that airport will be shown as the usual but with a “+” character added to the code, like “SIN+“.
2. If all airports are roughly the same size, they will be shown with a special cluster icon .

In either case, just click on the airport icon to get a list of all airports, and then you can pick the one you wanted.  Alternatively, just zoom in and the hidden airports will magically show up.

One final change: the simple-yet-oh-so-confusing hand/lasso (“select/region”) map controls are now history and OpenFlights is now always in “select” mode, where a single click selects airports and a double click zooms.  If you want to select a region to zoom into, hold down the Shift key, then click and pull the selection rectangle.

Making all this happen required an upgrade to our OpenLayers mapping software and a lot of poking about in the background (an excruciatingly detailed technogeek explanation can be found here), so please do let us know ASAP if anything seems wonky.  Feedback about the clustering is also welcome: is it great, terrible or somewhere in between?  The current cluster rule is “3 or more airports within 15 pixels get clustered”, should we be more aggressive or more laid-back?

Dynamically clusterphobic,
-jani

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

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

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

• German (Deutsch), courtesy of David Weck
• Lithuanian (lietuvių), by the team at Dreamsite.lt
• Polish (polski), courtesy of G. Jacykowski
• Swedish (svenska), courtesy of Gustav Gnosspelius

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

The French (français) and Russian (по русски) translations of OpenFlights are now complete.  Merci beaucoup to Mathieu Marquer for the first and спасибо большое to Alexey Aslanyants for the second!

In addition, German and Polish translations are currently in the works. Can you help us with another language, or did you find something that doesn’t sound or look quite right in the current versions? Send me mail.

Last but not least, we know there are still some parts of the interface that are not translated yet, notably the Help section and a few pulldown options.  We’re working on these and hope to have them rolled out sometime next week as well.

Looking for cunning linguists,
-jani