Gnopps

Great work jpatokal! Adding flights now work. I'll be happy to help with this site if you ever need any. One small feature I'd like to see is to see airline as well when you list your flights.

Anglo Large Clawed Otter

Eh, I seem to have made a grievous error when copying and pasting the GPS coordinates for DWH (D.W. Hooks Field in Houston, Texas) into the database. Any way to correct this? The correct coordinates are Lat: 30.063746, Long: -95.554276

jpatokal

Anglo Large Clawed Otter: Fixed. Editing airports (even those you're entered yourself) is currently not supported, but this may be added at some point in the future. For now, though, I've added more checking to ensure that only valid data is entered, and airport searches now highlight user-entered airports in pink.

SmilingBoy: The curves should look smoother now, since I bumped up the GC path plotting to one line every 500 mi, plus every 250mi for routes above 60 deg N/S, where the map projection causes the most distortion. Next, I need to figure out a way not to render all airports at high zoom levels, because this is the slowest part to draw...

Gnopps: Yes, this is on the to-do list, but it's a little harder than you might expect because I need to pull in the airline name from another database table, and I need to work out the logic to display just the airline code, not the entire name, but only if the user hasn't entered a flight code, except if the flight code doesn't have the airline code.

As for help, donations, adding OpenFlights to your sig, posting about it on other forums and/or nominating this thread for TalkMail are all welcome

rankourabu

It would be great to add your own airlines as you can with airports

I am missing 3 airlines that I've flown on
XG - Clickair
Y0 - Yellow Air Taxi
BL - Jetstar Pacific


Excellent tool

jpatokal

rankourabu: Ask and ye shall receive -- searching and adding airlines is implemented now! Just click on the plane icon next to the Airline box when editing, and try adding in your airlines. Two disclaimers though: duplicates of existing IATA codes are not allowed, and there's a lot of cruft in the airline DB currently as a result of the FlightMemory imports. Drop me a line if these are blocking you for adding an airline you need.

And from the "frivolous but fun" department, a new Analyze button has now appeared the page, giving you a handy-dandy overview of useful data like how many times you could have flown to Mars plus presentation-worthy pie charts of things like where in the plane you've been sitting. If you can think of more things to mine from the DB, let me know! Note that, in the interest of privacy, the Analyze pie charts are not available in your public profile unless you've set it to "Open".

TrueBlueFlyer

Ooooo I like the analyze function!

--Russ

sdwr98

Just thought I'd give my appreciation for this site - I switched over from flightmemory and really like the interactive map.

Great work!

jpatokal

It's been a little quiet in OpenFlightsLand lately, but I recently returned from a month-long trip and today rolled out a new version containing no less than sixteen (16) bug fixes and minor enhancements (details here). Probably the most noticeable is that, when you "Add" a flight now, it automatically flips your last destination to be your next starting point.

Up next on the agenda is a series of larger usability changes:
- The awkward textbox-into-pulldowns for airports and airlines will be replaced with autocomplete boxes.
- Plane types will become database-searchable, so you don't need to key them in yourself.
- When you select anything from a filter, it will be applied automatically, without requiring an "activation" click.
- The option of editing airports/airlines that you have added yourself will be implemented.

The Feature Requests tracker at SourceForge is growing, but please keep punching in your ideas!

Gnopps

Nice! One thing about the airplanes though: A database might be too details or not detailed enough for some users. What I mean is that some may prefer to enter their airplanes as say "B747" and be happy with that, while others may prefer to enter it as "B747-132". Becuase of this I like the current approach, that you get to enter your airplane details yourself.

An alternative solution might be to have a tree menu for the airplanes, where you can select how detailed you wish to go. Maybe like
B747 => B747-100 => B747-132 ?

jpatokal

Yes, this will still be possible. The idea is that, instead of having to punch in the entirety of "McDonnell-Douglas MD-90" or whatever, you can just type in "McD" and the autocomplete will suggest the rest to you. Or that's the plan anyway

prefers1a

Nice job guys. I'm a very avid FM user but am upset about the limited scrollability/zoomability.

And your import / HTML-Scrape is excellent. Really cool!

However, what I really like on FM is matching flights with other users and searching for flights - great for completing the details on all those flights I had when I was an infant (i.e. I can reconstruct the route and date from photographs, journals and passport stamps but not the aircraft or airline).

Planning to implement this?

BTW: I'm a very much looking forward to the reaction of FM on this.

jpatokal

Just a little announcement: I've rolled out autocompletion support, starting off with plane types, so now if you type in (say) "737" or "320", it'll pop up a list of matches to choose from. Feedback welcome, since this apparent simplication of the interface actually hides a lot of complexity; in particular, I'd like to know if it's not pulling up a common plane type. Filtering also became automatic a few days back, so the map is refreshed immediately after you select a trip/airline/year.

Up next, autocompletion for airports and airlines.

Thanks! Building CSV imports/exports is actually the next big item on the agenda. Importing from ba97.com and exporting to Google Earth (KMZ) is also on the "to do but not urgent" list.

Yes, but with baby steps. There are already lots of "travel social network" sites out there, so my first priority is to just make this the best travel mapper there is until I start branching out. But a rough planned feature set, not in any particular order:
- Quick airport search ("where is NTQ or WSSS?")
- Clicking on an airport to see all known routes from it
- Being able to add other OpenFlights users as "friends", so they can see your private maps/trips
- Notifications when your OF friends have flown/will fly to the same place as you

See this thread

sbm12

You might want to team up with this guy for this feature. It seems that he's found a way do get most of the routes into some sort of DB format.

jpatokal

Ah, that's the magic of OpenFlights. Instead of attempting to nail jelly to the wall, I can "crowdsource" my data, so if any airline opens any new route, it'll be added to my database as soon as somebody records their flight. Even right now, with a comparatively paltry ~25,000 flights, it's already surprisingly comprehensive: I can find eg. 152 unique routes from FRA and 100 routes from SIN.

Of course, there are no guarantees of accuracy. Routes are added and removed all the time, and a few people get their jollies by entering non-existent routes -- one guy even had a bit of an art project going on by making a pretty star shape radiating from Midway Island. But with judicious filtering by date and flight count it should be possible to minimize both.

prefers1a

Problem I have found: When I add an airport not on the list and I do not have an IATA or ICAO code, I can't import flights with that airport as origin or destination, but must enter them manually (although the airport is in the database). Examples, "airports" "Bergrestaurant" and "Uetliberg"...