Last month, OpenFlights moved to Github, and today we’re rolling out the first new feature enabled by this: airport edits on Github.

Until now, any edits to airports not submitted by yourself were sent by e-mail to a perennially backlogged review queue, which at time of writing has some 200+ edits waiting for review.  The downsides to this were legion: aside from the wait, there was no sensible way to distribute the load, no visibility into the status, and no way to prevent duplicate copies of exactly the same edit piling up in the queue.

Effective immediately, edits are instead posted as issues on Github, like this. This means they’re visible, so you can search and see if anybody else has reported the same thing; they’re automatically deduped, so that edits to the same airport (as determined by ICAO code) get added as comments to the existing issue; and they support “subscribing”, so you can get notified when it’s commented on, accepted or rejected.

And what’s more, you can now help.  Head over to https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights, “Watch” the repository, and configure how you’d like to be notified for new issues.  You can then review any edits and tell us if you think they should be accepted or rejected, making our job that much easier.

For time being, the autogenerated issues are pretty crude, you’re offered a chunk of SQL that you need to eyeball against any potential dupes.  We’re planning to upgrade this to a cleaner diff soon, and expand this to cover airline edits as well.

Gitting better every day,
-jani

It’s been a long time coming, but I am tickled pink to announce the release of a long-awaited feature: integration of OpenFlights.org with online trip planning tool extraordinaire TripIt.com, which lets you create travel itineraries for flights, hotels and more automatically simply by forwarding them your reservation emails.  Here’s how it works:

1. Log in to your OpenFlights account and select Import.
2. In the Import dialog, choose the newly minted Import from TripIt up top.
3. The first time only, you’ll be requested to authorize read-only access to TripIt.

You’ll then be presented with a list of your Tripit itineraries, newest first, with a separate tab for future flights.  Flights already in your OpenFlights record (same date, airports and direction) are automatically filtered out, and you can then choose Import for single flights or Import All for an entire trip.  Once done, click Close, and your newly imported flights will now be on your map.

As this is a new feature, bug reports, feedback and suggestions for improvement are very welcome.  And a big shout out to Andrew Chen for contributing virtually all the code for this!

Tripping it,
-jani

Many aviation enthusiasts will be familiar with the Great Circle Mapper, a handy website that does just what it says on the box: maps great circle routes on top of a world map.  And now, thanks to a patch contributed by an OpenFlights user, you can get your OpenFlights maps up on GCM as well: just choose List flights and then click the shiny new GCMap button, which will open up GCM in another tab with a map that looks something like this:

Since the GCMap export is based on the currently shown list of flights, you can apply filters before listing and thus control the output of the map quite precisely.  And since GCM generates its maps as flat images, you can save them locally and reuse them as you wish — although it’s worth bearing in mind that GCM, an external service not affiliated with OpenFlights, retains the copyright to anything you create there.

The same kind contributor also provided the new Class by distance piechart for Analyze, which shows how much time/distance you’ve spent in each class of seat, whereas the existing Class chart just showed number of flights.  As frequent flyers will know, while short hops are quite tolerable even in steerage, it’s the long flights where those lie-flat business seats really make a difference.

In new circles,
-j.

Today’s feature is a new trick by an old pony — now, you can finally open up (or link directly to) airline and airport route maps, instead of needing to go to the main page, type in your search, select the correct choice and load up the map you actually wanted.  Observe:

Finnair: http://openflights.org/airline/AY

Alice Springs: http://openflights.org/airport/ASP

Singapore Changi: http://openflights.org/query/WSSS

In other words, take http://openflights.org, add any of /airline/, /airport/ or /query/, and plug in either a two-letter airline IATA code (eg. AY for Finnair), a three-letter airport IATA code (ASP) or a four-letter airport ICAO code (WSSS), and you’ll get a link to a map of the airline or airport’s routes.  At the moment, it doesn’t matter which form of the URL you use, but the long-term plan is to make query behave in exactly the same way as the  search on the main page, so using the airport/airline forms is preferable if you expect the results to stay the same.

Alternatively, if you’d like to find out which airports and airlines are covered by OpenFlights, check out this page for a full listing.  As always, a tip of the hat to Airport Route Mapper for providing our data.

Maptastically yours,
-jani