Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

General

What is OpenFlights?

In a nutshell, it's a tool that lets you map your flights around the world, search and filter them in all sorts of interesting ways, calculate statistics automatically, and share the resulting maps with friends and the world — if you want to.

What can I do with OpenFlights?

Quite a few things:
  • Track exactly how far you've flown and how much time you've spent sitting on a plane. (Quite a few of our members have been to the Moon and back, but nobody has yet reached Mars.)
  • See at a glance where you've been and where you're going.
  • Rapidly search your flight history: now when did I go to the Bahamas, and on what airline?
  • Share your flights and trips with friends.

Why is OpenFlights better than other similar services?

Well, as far as we know there actually isn't anything quite like OpenFlights out there, but here are some things that separate us from the putative competition:
  • OpenFlights has a dynamic map. You can pan, zoom, select, scroll and explore all you like!
  • OpenFlights is user-friendly and efficient. Everything's on the same page!
  • OpenFlights makes searching really easy. Point and click!
  • OpenFlights has a powerful filter. Three clicks, and your map will show only Singapore Airlines flights in business class in 2007.
  • OpenFlights works in realtime. Make any change, and you'll see it right then and there.
  • OpenFlights supports "trips" (read more). You can join up any flights together into a trip, which you can then display on its own page and even share with friends.
  • OpenFlights is free in spirit. We don't try to lock you in: it's easy to import your data and export copies for safekeeping.
  • OpenFlights is free software. All our source code and (public) data is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and can be downloaded from SourceForge, so you can set up your own copy or just use the bits you like.
  • OpenFlights can be used anywhere. No need to install any programs, synchronize data or take care of backups, just point your browser to the site.

What browsers do you support?

Developed on Firefox 2 and 3, tested on Internet Explorer 7, and seems to work nicely on Safari as well. If it works or breaks on anything else, please let us know.

How much does it cost?

Using the website costs you absolutely nothing. However, our meager advertising revenue does not currently suffice even to pay for our bandwidth bills, so if you like the site, you're warmly encouraged to donate and help keep the site running. Donors receive "Elite" status with perks like no ads, password-protected private profiles, elite-level support, previews of upcoming features and more. See Donate for more.

Are you sure this thing will scale?

Yes! The heavy lifting of drawing the maps is handled by your browser, not any central server. The database is built to scale up and has been stress-tested by loading in over 100,000 flights, but key operations still took under 0.1 seconds each.

How do I sign up and start punching in my own flights?

Click on the button (on the main page, not here!) and pick a username. Your account will be created instantly, no e-mail confirmation or other tiresome hassles needed.

Features and bugs

Why is there a blank stripe in the map and/or half the airports disappear when I scroll around from the Americas to Asia or visa versa?

This is a bug/missing feature in the mapping system we're using. Stay tuned.

Why is the map slow to draw sometimes? Why do map updates slow down my computer?

Map tiles are loaded off the Internet, and the flights, airports etc are drawn on top by your own browser. We warmly recommend using Firefox 3, which is much faster than Internet Explorer. Alternatively, switch to a faster computer or just shrink the window size to speed up things. The NASA geographic map is also larger and thus slower to load than the Metacarta political map. Firefox 3

Why aren't the flight paths smoothly curved, especially up near the poles?

That would be hard to draw fast, so we cheat and chop them up, one segment per every 500 mi. Flights under 1000 mi are shown as straight lines.

The distances for the statistics, though, are calculated correctly as great circle distances.

Are those flight time estimates accurate? Can I enter my own?

The site currently uses a really fancy formula to calculate them: "30 min plus 1 hour per every 500 miles". This seems to be a surprisingly good approximation for commercial flights (anything from 100 to 10000 mi).

Letting users enter start and end times and calculating the duration from there is a pending feature, but time zones make this harder than you'd think. However, you can already manually overwrite the duration if you wish.

Why is my favorite airport/heliport/patch of grass missing?

If you can't find your airport right away, click on the or icons to launch the advanced search. If you're looking for a decommissioned airport, you may need to use the ICAO code instead of the IATA code. For example, ATH points to Athens-Eleftherios Venizelos (LGAV), but you can still find Athens-Ellinikon as LGAT. If the main OpenFlights DB doesn't have it, try a search in the DAFIF database with the airport's name or ICAO code. If you find it in DAFIF, click to load its data, add the name and IATA code (the two missing parts) and then to copy it over.

If you still can't find it, you can click on while creating a new flight to add your own airport. You can also enter heliports, landing strips and other informal airports which do not have IATA or ICAO codes, just leave the IATA/ICAO fields blank and click "OK" when warned about it.

Oh, you asked why? Well, the reason is that publicly available airport data with coordinates is astonishingly bad. (For example, the best source file we could find for IATA codes still thinks the Soviet Union exists.) Merging and fixing up the limited information out there into something usable has been a major headache, and we need your help to find the problem areas so we can correct them.

Your calendar only goes back to 1970, how do I enter an earlier flight?

You don't have to use the calendar widget, just enter the date manually.

How do I delete an airport/airline/trip that I no longer need?

For airports and airlines, just remove all flights using it, and it will stop appearing.

To delete a trip, load it in the Trip editor and select Delete. Any flights still in that trip will be kept, they will just set as tripless.

How do I share my flight map with friends?

Point them to http://openflights.org/user/yourname. You can also click on when logged in to find your address; this is particularly useful if your name has spaces or unusual characters.

Example: http://openflights.org/user/jpatokal

Can my friends also edit my flights?

Yes, if you give them your password. You'd better trust them though, since they can now change all your settings and even delete your flights. While the system does not officially support being logged in as the same user from many places at once, in practice this is unlikely to cause problems.

Something went wrong when I imported from FlightMemory!

This most often happens with airlines, since FlightMemory and OpenFlights do not render all company names in the same way. OpenFlights also uses current airline data, not historical, so eg. SN123 will be mapped to "Brussels Airlines", not "Sabena". If you had lots of flights get wrongly assigned, please drop us a line and we'll try to sort it out, but for only a few flights, it's easiest to repair by hand. Exporting to CSV, editing in Excel, and reimporting is also a viable option.

The other common source of headaches is unofficial airports like heliports and landing strips, which do not have IATA/ICAO codes. These have to be entered manually into OpenFlights using "Add new airport" before you can import. Note that the matching is done based on the first word of the airport name, so make sure the one in your data matches the one you enter exactly.

If anything else goes wrong during importing, though, it's a bug and we'd like to know about it. Drop us a line, tell us exactly what went wrong, and (this is important) give the "Tmpfile" value from the top of the import page so we can replicate it.

You really need to implement cool feature X, and fix terrible bug Y, and do it right now!

Please check SourceForge to see if they're already reported, and add them if not. But remember, this is open source, so the best way to get anything done is to do it yourself! Bug reports from people who have donated to the site also get priority.

Direct links: Known bugs, Feature requests

You said feature X was implemented/bug Y was fixed yesterday, but I don't see it!

Your browser probably has an old version still in memory. Please hit Control-F5 to force it to reload the entire page.

Technical jibber-jabber

Did you really code that map all by yourself?

No sir, the credit goes to OpenLayers. We just added the fluff on top.

And the rest of it?

JavaScript frontend chock full of AJAX-y goodness served off Apache running on Linux, plus PHP scripts on the backend shifting through reams of data pulled from MySQL. In other words, a classic LAMP stack.

Where did you get all that airline and airport data, and can I have it too?

Airport data (c. 4000 airports) was generated by mashing together DAFIF (October 2006 cycle) for location, ICAO data and country data with the Global Airport Database for IATA codes and city names, plus lots of manual updating.

Airline data (c. 5000 airlines) was extracted directly from Wikipedia's gargantuan List of airlines.

Raw data, cooked data and recipes can be found in the SourceForge SVN repository. Please do chip us a few bucks if you use it, because commercial equivalents cost upwards of US$1000 a pop!

See also: Help: Database

I want to export to/import from OpenFlights format. Where is your CSV specification?

Right here: Help: CSV. It's pretty straightforward, but let us know if something is not working the way you expect.

I want an anonymized dump of flight data from OpenFlights or a customized installation for my airline/airport/website/other company.

We'd be delighted to work out a deal for consulting work, just drop us a line.