FLYGVA

I added my flights, too (thanks to a boring meeting ) and I second that. Esp. sind EWR-SIN is across Africa on the map instead of Nothpole

SmilingBoy

Added my flights, too and added a few airports along the way.

One issue I encountered: I have a flight from Basel/Mulhouse/Freiburg Airport. This airport has both the MLH and BSL IATA codes. In flightmemory, I have it recorded as BSL. Openflights did not have BSL, but MLH. I added in BSL now, and had to skip the ICAO code since this would have resulted in a duplicate.

There should be a way to add aliases for airport codes to avoid this.

Two of the airline names were also not imported correctly: "SAS Scandinavian Airlines" imported incorrectly as "SAS Braathens" and "SN Brussels Airlines imported incorrectly as SNCF". Hm, turns out it is not so easy to change these in retrospect as I can't find them as the list of flights does not give the airline name. Can you add this to the list of fields that are displayed?

SmilingBoy

OK, it is actually easy - select the airline in the filter and the list the flights.

However, there is still a problem: When I try to enter "SN Brussels Airlines" it changes this automatically to "Brussels Airlines (SN)". However, these are two distinct airlines - actually, the latter was formed by the merger of ther former with Virgin Express.

apoivre

Just imported some 130+ flights from FM and one thing that bothers me is if you don't remember the airline it becomes Private Flight. Surely there must be a way to leave the airline name field empty (or add N/A, Don't Remember and some such)

There's also no way to add a IATA code to an entry that's already in the database but doesn't have it (DAFIF).

TrueBlueFlyer

Indeed... that will make the site uniquely different from FM

jpatokal

SmilingBoy: Basel/Mulhouse/Freiburg is such a strange duck that it's not worth rejigging the whole database structure to accommodate it. I think what you're done is fine: MLH is now the "main" entry (with the ICAO code), and BSL is another airport that just happens to be in the same place.

I've just implemented the idea of "airline aliases", which works around some of the most common FlightMemory<->OpenFlights naming discrepancies, and eg. SAS Scandinavian and SN Brussels flights should now import correctly.

Airline history, like SN representing Sabena, SN Brussels and Brussels at various points in time, gets really complicated. For imports, there isn't really a practical way to differentiate these: it will use the code, and that code maps to current airline using it, in this case Brussels. The option to add new airlines, incl. historical ones, and assign your flights to them is in the works though.

apoivre: To add an IATA code to an existing DAFIF airport, you need to [Load] it into the editor, add the IATA code and city name, then save it. The new, saved copy goes into the OpenFlights DB, which can then be used for your flights.

tfung: Anybody's map will look a little messy with almost 1000 flights all over the world. But I've slimmed down the flight paths for frequently flown routes a bit. Great Circle routes are on the to-do list, but the rendering math involved gets pretty complicated pretty fast.

jpatokal

Just rolled out a fairly major change to OpenFlights, although it doesn't look like it at first glance. Basically, the flight editing framework was given a total rewrite:

• You can now move backwards and forwards in any flight list
• The system tracks whether you've made any changes: you can only save once you've made some, and you're alerted if you forget to save
• When you exit the flight editor, the flight list is automatically updated.

This makes it much faster to, say, fix import errors or assign flights to a trip. However, due to the amount of new plumbing behind the scenes, this will also probably throw up some bugs in the next few days, so please let me know ASAP if you get any strange behavior.

A few usability questions:

• Is anybody actually using the "click on airport to enter it" feature in the flight editor? This seems to confuse the hell out my on-site tester ("why don't I get the bubble any more when I click on that airport?"), so I'm thinking of dropping it entirely.
• Instead of requiring you to manually "Save", should the editor just automatically save any changes unless you click on "Undo"? (Which doesn't exist yet, but could easily be added.)

And by popular demand, I guess I'll have to implement great circle plotting. Busy week ahead though, so it may take a while...

Gnopps

This is a great site, keep up the good work!

However, I can't seem to add any new flights. The page always gets stuck at the airline. No matter what I enter in that box it never searches the database. Thus when I click "Add" nothing happens. I have the same problem using both Firefox and IE.

TrueBlueFlyer

I'm too lazy to check if this has been suggested in an earlier thread...


but is there a way to integrate future flights into this? (like BA97 Calendar)


I think this would be pretty neat for people that don't fly much like me to list future fligths which would automatically become taken flights after the date fo the flight when you could go back and edit the details like the plane registration number, plane name, etc.


--Russ

TrueBlueFlyer

It appears you can add future flights without a problem... as I just tried.

I believe FT doesn't let you do this, hence my original question.

--Russ

GreyedOut

Looks like great circle plotting was implemented. That was fast! Nice work ^

jpatokal

Gar! Sorry, this annoying little bug crept in a few days ago, preventing only new users from entering flights (which is why I didn't notice it...). It should be fixed now, so please try again and let me know if it's still not working.

And yes, great circle routes are now implemented! Writing the code to render them was, if not exactly easy, then still rather less painful than I expected; getting it working right on IE7 had me tearing my hair out for a while though. I wasn't actually all that convinced about the importance of this, but now that it's done, I have to say it looks a lot better than before!

Right now, all great circle paths are rendered in "lo-res" mode, meaning one segment every 1000 mi -- looks OK in full-world view near the equator, but gets pretty choppy near the poles or if you zoom in. Up next, user configuration, after which you can choose no GC routes (fastest), lo-res (every 1000 mi, default), or hi-res (every 200? mi, slowest) rendering.

JerseyVics: The calendar shows only the last 10 years, but manually you can enter anything you like: anything between the years 0 and 9999 is fair game. Displaying future flights in a different color or as a dotted line is already on the to-do list.

FLYGVA

Indeed looks really better now ^

TrueBlueFlyer

different color may be confusing, however dotted line would be perfect!

thanks for your hard work on this, it makes this hobby more fun.

--Russ

SmilingBoy

I was wondering whether there would be a way to make the GC routes look even better. Is there maybe a function that displays a smooth line through the calculated points instead of straight lines between points? I would imagine that this would give quite a good approximation of the GC route even with only few actually calculated GC route points. Maybe an initial heading would be needed for this, too though.