greatcirclemap.com – Display flight routes on top of Google maps
 

Hey everyone,

I recently finished building www.greatcirclemap.com.

The website lets you enter airport codes or names of cities and it then plots the great circle path between the airports on a map. If you've ever used www.gcmap.com or www.greatcirclemapper.net you know the concept. I have personally spent countless hours on these sites, but I thought they could be improved upon:

Gcmap.com is nice but the map-image is small and doesn't let you zoom in since it's just an image. Greatcirclemapper.net is zoomable since it uses google maps but is painfully slow because the entire page has to reload every time you put in more routes.

greatcirclemap.com should be much faster than both of those sites since it never reloads the page. If you type in a route, it will appear instantly.

Attachment 35954

TIP: Check the “Raw input”-toggle if you already know the airport codes. It will let you input ICAO- or IATA-codes manually so you don't have to bother with auto-complete. It should work exactly like gcmap.com.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, I would greatly appreciate it! Seriously, I've put in so much time in this project, so if you have any feedback at all I'd love to hear it.

I really like this.

For the heck of nit-bits, clicking on 'km' could switch through the other units? ;-)
on mobile (android7/chrome59) the 3 buttons dont appear - and since (by you?) the +/- buttons on the map are suppresed, zooming in/out cant work on mobile.

Yet: very cool, nice work!

Thanks for taking the time.

I did take out the +/- buttons. I thought noone used them haha. The way it's supposed to work on mobile is that if you touch the map or make a swiping motion, the side-menu will disappear. Then you can zoom in/out by pinching your fingers like on normal google maps.


That's a good idea. A lot of people will probably not realize that they can switch distance unit in the settings menu, since it's a bit hidden. I'll consider changing it.

Something I just thought of: Do you think it would be a good idea for the default unit to be miles for people in the US, while other people still get kilometers? That could make it less likely that someone would want to change the setting in the frist place...?

Got it.. swiping the query bar to the side reveals the settings-buttons. Then zooming with two fingers works here, indeed. Not a mobile-native..

Geo-IP based units? Why not.. speaking of it: which 'miles' are status relevant, statute or nautical? ;-)

Add a factor for J + F (in LH that would be 200 and 300%). Everybody lazy there ;)

Frequent flyer miles always refer to statute miles.

Btw, I went to Lufthansas miles calculator just to see if it gives you the correct amount of miles... and it doesn't. If you book FRA - BKK in P you get 5584 award miles, but the real distance is 5598 miles. A difference of (gasp) 14 miles. Hm...

I didn't get a total distance on my desktop results (Win 10, Chrome or Edge). However, it was simple to use and fast. I also noticed that if you switch tabs while not in "raw input" mode, the entry field will be empty when you come back (could be annoying when typing a long list).

Hm, maybe you entered only two airports at a time? Total distance is only shown if you enter three airports or more as part of one "route". (Like "JFK-DXB-DEL" in the OP image).

Good to hear you found it easy to use otherwise.

Good catch, I should be able to fix that for the next update.

Thanks for the hard work trying to improve gc. I use gc often so your work to improve it will be highly appreciate by me, and others for sure!

Indeed it is fast! ^

I use the map in my trip report posted in the TR Forum of FT. Being able to get a larger map is a plus!

My other use of flight map is to document my own travel in travel journals. I often print these journals. The problem so far with online maps are that they have low resolution (72dpi), not suitable for printing. Is it possible to have 300 dpi?

One more observation: the airport codes are written on top of a BLACK background, it is possible to have a TRANSPARENT background (no background)? I think it improves readability without background.

Thanks again!

Good suggestion. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it is possible for me to implement high dpi prints. It is simply not supported by the Google maps API which is a shame.

More customization options (colors, appearance, etc) will probably come in future updates.

Thanks for the kind words by the way. Much appreciated.

Great work, flyingmeatball!

Getting a 404 Page not found since yesterday afternoon :'-(

working just fine for me

The homepage does, but not an actual route, like http://www.greatcirclemap.com/HAM-MRU

Does it? Tried three different browsers.

Maybe the syntax changed because I did that from the home page and the resulting URL was http://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=HAM-MRU

That works, thanks.