News from OpenFlights, the site for flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing
OpenFlights is getting a major workover to support full localization, so the site will be down for about an hour starting Monday June 8, 0:00 UTC for database migration and web server reconfiguration.
Want to help us translate the site into other languages? Register your interest by mailing info at openflights dot org today. No programming ability needed, and we’ll be handing out free Elite levels to people who can help.
Multilingually yours,
-jani
Disclaimer: The following is intolerably technical and doesn’t really have anything at all to do with flying. Non-geeks, please head straight for the emergency exit.
Now, for the few brave people who are actually interested in the intricacies of Javascript localization…
One hundred thousand! (100,588 as I type this, to be quite precise.) That’s how many flights have now been entered into OpenFlights. Let’s see how the current statistics compare to what we had at 50,000 just a few short months back, shall we?
Top 10 Airlines
| Airline | 50k rank | World rank | |
| 1 | United Airlines | 1 | 2 |
| 2 | Lufthansa | 2 | 6 |
| 3 | Continental Airlines | 4 (+1) | 4 |
| 4 | American Airlines | 3 (-1) | 1 |
| 5 | Delta Air Lines | 5 | 2 |
| 6 | British Airways | 7 (+1) | 9 |
| 7 | Northwest Airlines | 8 (+1) | 7 |
| 8 | US Airways | 6 (-2) | ? |
| 9 | Scandinavian Airlines | new | ? |
| 10 | Air France | 13 (+3) | 5 |
Not a huge difference to last time, with United and Lufthansa still duking it out for the top spot. Air France clambers onto the list, so 8 of the world’s top 10 are now represented, with only #8 Southwest (#19 of OF) and #10 Singapore (#13 on OF) still missing the cut.
Top 10 Airports
| Airport | 50k rank | World rank | |
| 1 | Frankfurt Main (FRA) | 2 (+1) | 9 |
| 2 | London-Heathrow (LHR) | 3 (+1) | 2 |
| 3 | Chicago Ohare Intl (ORD) | 1 (-2) | 3 |
| 4 | Houston-George Bush Intcntl (IAH) | 5 (+1) | 16 |
| 5 | Munchen (MUC) | 4 (-1) | 27 |
| 6 | Los Angeles Intl (LAX) | 8 (+2) | 6 |
| 7 | Amsterdam-Schiphol (AMS) | new | 19 |
| 8 | Atlanta-Hartsfield | 12 (+4) | 1 |
| 9 | New York-John F Kennedy Intl (JFK) | 6 (-3) | 13 |
| 10 | San Francisco Intl (SFO) | 10 | 19 |
Frankfurt and London-Heathrow push Chicago out of the top spot. World #1 Atlanta enters the list at #5, but despite Air France’s success in the airline category, world #5 Paris-CDG slips off the list to #12 and is replaced by Amsterdam. Still no sign of world #4 Tokyo-Haneda.
What next?
Now in development are a few features that will start to leverage on this mass of data. Up first, the ability to check what airlines fly to a given airport and what routes they operate on. Stay tuned!
Forward to the future,
-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
I’ll be giving a short talk entitled Open Travel Culture: Wikitravel and OpenFlights at BarCampKL, held at Inti College Subang Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur on Saturday-Sunday, Apr 4-5th, 2009. My slot is tentatively scheduled for Saturday at 11 AM in Room 4, but this being an unconference that’s subject to change. This will be more or less the same as my talk at BarCampSingapore if you missed that, but there’s a lot of other interesting Travel 2.0 action going on in KL as well and I’ll be there for both days. See you there!
Raising the bar,
-jani
To date, OpenFlights has been all about flying — too bad if you occasionally used other modes of transport as well. But today, a major new feature has been rolled out: instead of just flights, you can enter train, road or ship journeys as well. This introduces a large number of other changes, some obvious, some subtle:
Now, rest assured the focus of OpenFlights is and will remain on flying. The primary purpose of allowing more than just flights is to “fill in the gaps” between those flights, which is why all journeys still have to start or end at airports. Take a look at a sample trip that shows how this works:
To add your own train, car and ship journeys, just switch into the Detailed editor (or pull up an airline search dialog in Basic) and choose your mode from the Flight pulldown. We’ve also made it a little easier to enter new railway/bus/shipping companies, since there aren’t too many in the database at the moment: just hit Save after entering an unknown carrier, and you’ll be asked if you want to add it.
Last but not least, OpenFlights has switched to the Google Charts API, so those little pie charts under Analyze now look a whole lot nicer.
Find any bugs, or something simply not working the way you expect? Let us know.
By sea, air and land,
-jani
One of our first feature requests was simply entitled “more stats“, but it’s taken a while to work through the wish list. Today that request (which kept on growing larger and more complex!) was finally marked as completed, and here’s what you get.
Top 10 by mileage: Previously, the Top 10 screen ranked your routes, airports, airlines and planes simply by the number of times you’ve flown, whether it was a short commuter hop or an intercontinental long haul. Now, you can also select “Sort by… Mileage” to rank them by distance flown, which gives a better reflection of where you’ve spent your time.
Top 10, 20 or 50: And now you’re not limited to a list of the top 10, another pulldown lets you show up to the top 50.
And it looks nicer: We’ve tweaked the appearance of the Top 10 lists, so they look better in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox.
Country count: Over at Analyze, the number of countries you’ve visited is now shown.
Average flight: In addition to the shortest and longest flight, a theoretical “Average flight” is also computed, showing how long in distance and duration your flights usually are.
If you’re interested in sitewide statistics as well as your own, take a look at the About page, which is updated nightly. Anything else you’d like to see?
Ecstatistically yours,
-jani
A few new features for our Facebook app have been rolled out since the original announcement, so I thought I’d take a moment to share them with you.
First, today’s new feature: instead of just updating your friends when you add new flights to OpenFlights, which is interesting but, quite frankly, not all that useful, you can now also opt to post updates on the day you fly: the perfect way to let your friends know that you’re in town! Be sure to enter your flights ahead of time, or at least on the same day, to make use of this though. Note that for existing users, this is turned off by default: to enable it, go to the Facebook app page and, under “Feed preferences”, check the box next to “On the day I fly”.
Also, as of today, editing existing flights no longer causes updates to be sent to Facebook. We originally thought it would be nice to know about changes, but in the end the cost in clutter and confusion was a bit too high.
Last but not least, since February 9th, the example thumbnail in your OpenFlights profile box has been replaced with a miniature map of your flights, complete with color-coding for airports from busiest to quietest. If your profile is still showing the old version, click on “Refresh” to bring it up to speed.
And that’s all for today: if you like the application, please do invite your friends to try it out, and share your thoughts at the OpenFlights.org fan page as well.
Face forward,
-jani
I’ll be giving a short talk entitled Open Travel Culture: Wikitravel and OpenFlights at BarCampSingapore3, held at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore on Saturday, Feb 28th, 2009. My slot is tentatively scheduled for 4:30 to 5 PM in Room 3, but this being an unconference that’s subject to change. As you can guess from the title, in addition to OpenFlights, I’ll also be talking about Contentshare’s other major free culture project, Wikitravel Press. See you there!
UPDATE: Thanks to all who showed up, it was a great event and a great crowd. The slides are now up on Slideshare.
Raising the bar,
-jani
Today I’m delighted to announce OpenFlights‘ coolest feature yet: KML exports. KML, or “Keyhole Markup Language“, is the data format used by Google Earth and many other 3D visualization programs, so now you can turn your OpenFlights maps into this:
Exporting from OpenFlights couldn’t be much easier, just click on List flights and then hit the new KML button up top. Load the resulting file in Google Earth — just double-clicking should do the trick — and there’s your map, in glorious 3D! And if your planet looks a little too busy, you can tweak your OpenFlights filter and export, say, only one airline’s flights or only this year’s flights.
Airports are sized and color-coded, from big and yellow (busiest) to small and green (least visited), and you can click on them for more information. Flight routes take into account the airport’s altitude and even approximate takeoff and landing paths, although runways and actual approach paths are not accounted for.
If you want to give 3D maps a shot before you start entering your own, download this sample (337 KB) and load it in Google Earth. Tip: zoom into an airport and “tilt” the view with your middle button/scroll wheel to see the flight paths!
Anything else you’d like to see in your KML exports? Let us know.
Going for a spin,
-jani
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