OpenFlights

State of the Data: One million flights!

openflights — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:31:00 +0000

Calloo, callay, what a frabjous day! On December 11, 2011, the number of flights entered into OpenFlights crossed the one million mark. It’s quite a milestone, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you all for making it possible. It took just over a year to double the flight count from 500,000, so let’s see what has changed since then.

Top 10 Airlines

	Airline	500k rank	World rank
1	United/Continental	1 (+2)	1
2	Lufthansa	2	5
3	Delta/Northwest	3 (-2)	2
4	American Airlines	4	4
5	Air France-KLM	5	8
6	British Airways	7 (+1)	?
7	Ryanair	8 (+1)	?
8	US Airways	9 (+1)	7
9	Scandinavian	10 (+1)	10
10	Qantas	new	?

Yet another mega-merger brings United/Continental to the top in both IATA’s 2010 stats and on OpenFlights, beating Lufthansa by a hair and pushing reigning champion Delta/Northwest back into 3rd place. But the rest of the list, astonishingly, is static: since Continental was swallowed by United, its newly freed slot pulls up everybody below #5 up a notch and squeaks Qantas back onto the board at #10 after a near-three-year hiatus, but their ordering is the same.

So who’s missing? World #2 Southwest continues to be disdained by OpenFlyers, who rank it at #20, a notch down from the previous #19. Perhaps emboldened by our recent launch in Chinese, new world #6 China Southern Airlines has climbed up six spots but remains distant at #43, with world #9 China Eastern Airlines (world #9) pipping it by one place to #42

A statistical sidenote: on OpenFlights, we figure out airlines from flight numbers, so regional affiliates not using their parents’ codes are not going to show up here. Since all the majors have their own sidelines, I figure they’re all disadvantaged more or less equally, and this thus probably doesn’t make a huge difference.

Top 10 Airports

	Airport	250k rank	World rank
1	Frankfurt Main (FRA)	1	9
2	London-Heathrow (LHR)	2	3
3	Chicago Ohare Intl (ORD)	3	4
4	Munchen (MUC)	5 (+1)	26
5	Charles de Gaulle (CDG)	4 (-1)	6
6	Los Angeles Intl (LAX)	6	5
7	Amsterdam-Schiphol (AMS)	7	14
8	Atlanta-Hartsfield (ATL)	8	1
9	New York-John F Kennedy Intl (JFK)	9	16
10	San Francisco Intl (SFO)	10	22

No change in the top three, with Frankfurt still reigning supreme, and the rest of the list has remained static as well with the sole exception of Teutonic flyers pushing Munich back up to #4, above Charles de Gaulle. World #2 Beijing only makes it to #24 on OpenFlights, and still no sign of newly international Haneda, although Narita shows up at #40.

And now for something a little different:

Top 3 Airlines and Airports By Language

	Language	Share	Top 3 airlines	Top 3 airports
1	English	76.5%	United, Lufthansa, Delta	LHR, FRA, ORD
2	Russian	7.8%	Aeroflot, S7, Transaero	SVO, DME, LED
3	German	7.5%	Lufthansa, Air Berlin, Ryanair	FRA, MUC, DUS
4	French	3.1%	Air France, Lufthansa, Air Austral	CDG, ORY, LYS
5	Polish	1.2%	LOT Polish, Ryanair, Lufthansa	WAW, KRK, KTW
6	Portuguese (Brazilian)	1.1%	BRA, TAM, GOL	GRU, CGH, BSB
7	Spanish	0.9%	Iberia, Ryanair, Alitalia	MAD, BCN, ALC
8	Finnish	0.8%	Finnair, Lufthansa, Blue1	HEL, FRA, ARN
9	Swedish	0.5%	SAS Scandinavian, KLM, Lufthansa	ARN, CPH, GOT
10	Chinese (Mandarin)	0.4%	Air China, China Southern, China Eastern	PEK, SHA, SZX

Splitting up the flight database by the user’s preferred language, it’s surprising (or, on second thought, perhaps not?) how local flying still is: for Russians, Germans, French, Poles, Brazilians, Spaniards and Chinese, all three top airports are in the language’s home country. The only international hubs that sneaks onto others’ lists are Frankfurt and Stockholm-Arlanda for the Finns and, oddly, Frankfurt for English-speakers as well — presumably simply because many of OpenFlights’ German users have not switched their language. On the airline side, for every language the flag carrier of the home country dominates, but this time Lufthansa sneaks onto 4 lists outside Germany and Ryanair isn’t far behind at 3.

* * *

Last and least, in less happy news, we have finally put our long-ailing Facebook app out of its misery. Ideas for what should replace it are welcome, and work is ever-so-slowly continuing on TripIt integration.

To infinity and beyond,
-jani

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OpenFlights now in Chinese! 欢迎光临OpenFlights中文版!

openflights — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 11:29:55 +0000

OpenFlights has just added over one billion potential users, thanks to a Chinese translation by sscat. This means that OpenFlights is now available in 12 different languages, and we’re still looking for more — if you can help, take a look at the instructions! It’s easy and no programming skills are needed. You can also use the same instructions to edit existing translations if you find something that looks a bit funny.

And if you’re curious, here’s a breakdown of the current user base by language, with an estimate of the language’s share of Internet users in 2011 in parentheses:

English 75.7% (26.8%)
German 8.1% (3.6%)
Russian 8.0% (3.0%)
French 3.4% (3.0%)
Portuguese 1.1% (3.9%)
Spanish 0.9% (7.8%)
Finnish 0.9% (n/a)
Swedish 0.4% (n/a)
Japanese 0.2% (4.7%)
Chinese 0.1% (24.2%) — but hey, it’s only been a few days!
Lithuanian 0.03% (n/a)

As it turns out, the only top 10 languages not supported by OpenFlights yet are Arabic (#7) and Korean (#10). Help us fill these gaps!

Polyglottally yours,
-j.

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Great Circle meets OpenFlights

openflights — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:30:54 +0000

Many aviation enthusiasts will be familiar with the Great Circle Mapper, a handy website that does just what it says on the box: maps great circle routes on top of a world map. And now, thanks to a patch contributed by an OpenFlights user, you can get your OpenFlights maps up on GCM as well: just choose List flights and then click the shiny new GCMap button, which will open up GCM in another tab with a map that looks something like this:

Since the GCMap export is based on the currently shown list of flights, you can apply filters before listing and thus control the output of the map quite precisely. And since GCM generates its maps as flat images, you can save them locally and reuse them as you wish — although it’s worth bearing in mind that GCM, an external service not affiliated with OpenFlights, retains the copyright to anything you create there.

The same kind contributor also provided the new Class by distance piechart for Analyze, which shows how much time/distance you’ve spent in each class of seat, whereas the existing Class chart just showed number of flights. As frequent flyers will know, while short hops are quite tolerable even in steerage, it’s the long flights where those lie-flat business seats really make a difference.

In new circles,
-j.

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Quick and easy URLs for airport and airline route maps

openflights — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 05:52:03 +0000

Today’s feature is a new trick by an old pony — now, you can finally open up (or link directly to) airline and airport route maps, instead of needing to go to the main page, type in your search, select the correct choice and load up the map you actually wanted. Observe:

Finnair: http://openflights.org/airline/AY

Alice Springs: http://openflights.org/airport/ASP

Singapore Changi: http://openflights.org/query/WSSS

In other words, take http://openflights.org, add any of /airline/, /airport/ or /query/, and plug in either a two-letter airline IATA code (eg. AY for Finnair), a three-letter airport IATA code (ASP) or a four-letter airport ICAO code (WSSS), and you’ll get a link to a map of the airline or airport’s routes. At the moment, it doesn’t matter which form of the URL you use, but the long-term plan is to make query behave in exactly the same way as the search on the main page, so using the airport/airline forms is preferable if you expect the results to stay the same.

Alternatively, if you’d like to find out which airports and airlines are covered by OpenFlights, check out this page for a full listing. As always, a tip of the hat to Airport Route Mapper for providing our data.

Maptastically yours,
-jani

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Buggy airport data? Now you can fix it yourself!

openflights — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:24:00 +0000

Until today, pretty much the only way you could fix a bug in OpenFlights airport data was to submit a bug report, never quite as fast or painless a process as you might hope. But now, there’s a better way: click on or search for the airport , click the edit icon , tweak the data until you are satisfied and hit “Save changes”. Previously, this would have give you an error message unless you had actually created the airport in question; now, it will fire off a submission to OpenFlights HQ, where our mad scientists will verify that your suggested change makes sense and either accept or reject it. Either way, you’ll soon get an e-mail message telling you what happened, and the data will be that much better.

Two caveats: you have to be logged in (the “Save changes” button will be grayed out if you aren’t), and for time being this only works on airports. If it’s popular enough, we’ll enable this for airlines as well. Give it a spin and let us know how it works for you!

Collaboratively,
-j.

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Facebook updates back online, for now

openflights — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:15:45 +0000

A few weeks back Facebook once again broke the OpenFlights app, this time in style: by deprecating a critical API call, status updates started to aborted halfway through, causing some people to get an incessant stream of spam since the status went through, but the fact that it went through wasn’t recorded. Gar! My patience with Facebook long since exhausted, I simply disabled the updater for time being, but fortunately Niko was kind enough to send us a patch that seems to fix the problem and adds in country names to your updates as a bonus.

So, long story short, if you disabled your app because of this problem, you can turn it on again. But it’s only a matter of time until Facebook breaks it again.

Sigh,
-j.

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Animate your flights with FlightGlobe

openflights — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:47:59 +0000

There’s a long-standing feature request to create an animated “slide show” of your OpenFlights, and I was delighted to find out recently that it’s been done in the best way possible — by somebody else!

FlightGlobe is a nifty desktop application for Mac and Windows that takes an OpenFlights CSV export (”List flights”, then click on “CSV”) and displays them on an animated 3D globe that spins about as you criss-cross the world, providing a neat way of viewing your travels if you’ve been methodical about recording your flight dates. While the current version is simple and straightforward, the Java source code is available so any programmers out there can try their hand at adding bells and whistles. Give it a spin!

Syndicated,
-j.

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Improvements to FlightMemory imports

openflights — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:55:00 +0000

I’ll be frank: the bit of code for importing flights from our friends at FlightMemory to OpenFlights has long been riddled with bugs, and that’s why we’ve at long last thrown out the bulk of the plumbing and rebuilt it with shiny new pipe. This has already fixed a number of bugs (most notably, accented characters getting lost), but there may be loose fittings somewhere, so please let us know ASAP if something’s leaking on the floor somewhere. The next roaches in queue to be swatted are this (can’t handle ICAO codes for airlines) and this (duplicates in database). And if you’d be really keen on one-step imports (that is, give the site your FM password and it’ll slurp up all your flights), now would be a good time to say so!

(more…)

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Farewell to Facebook

openflights — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 05:26:04 +0000

Like many other developers, I have hated the way Facebook handles applications for a long time: the APIs are buggy as hell, poorly documented, change constantly, crippled beyond belief, completely proprietary, a vast pain to test and debug, and increasingly obviously geared towards moving everything off the open Web and into Facebook itself. But with several thousand OpenFlights users happily using the app, we put up with the pain.

But now the camel’s back is broken. Only a few short weeks ago, Facebook announced that profile boxes were doomed and that all applications had to migrate to profile tabs. We duly did so, only to get smacked in the face with another wet trout: as of today, profile tabs are also gone. Their replacement? Nothing: all applications have to live on their own pages within Facebook, and users aren’t allowed to attach them to their profiles in any way, shape or form. Too bad if you want to share your flight map with your friends, because as of now, you can’t.

So we’re going to do the only thing we can: say a nice, big hearty “fuck you” to Facebook and start looking for alternatives. Any suggestions?

(And just to be clear: the part of the OpenFlights Facebook app that feeds your flights to your Wall is not affected and not going away for the moment. However, it’s a matter of time until Facebook breaks it again, and at that point we’ll probably nuke the app for good.)

Blackfaced,
-jani

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State of the Data at 500,000 flights

openflights — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:28:27 +0000

Half a million user-entered flights! That’s a pretty respectable number, and the way things are going, we’ll be looking at the Big One-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh sometime early next year. What’s changed since 250,000?

Top 10 Airlines

	Airline	250k rank	World rank
1	Delta/Northwest	5 (+4)	1
2	Lufthansa	1 (-1)	5
3	United Airlines	2 (-1)	4
4	American Airlines	3 (-1)	3
5	Air France-KLM	7 (+2)	6
6	Continental Air Lines	4 (-2)	9
7	British Airways	6 (-1)	?
8	Ryanair	10 (+2)	8
9	US Airways	9	10
10	Scandinavian	11 (+1)	?

The big news is that Delta-Northwest grabs the top spot in both IATA’s 2009 stats and on OpenFlights, beating Lufthansa by a hair. Similarly, Air France-KLM has leapt ahead and Ryanair continues its inexorable ascent, grabbing the 8th position in both lists. So once again we’ve got 8 out of 10: as ever, world #2 Southwest remains striking in its absence, although it did creep up two spots to OpenFlights #19, and world #7 China Southern Airlines is a mere #49 in OpenFlights. Chinese flyers, where are you?

Top 10 Airports

	Airport	250k rank	World rank
1	Frankfurt Main (FRA)	1	9
2	London-Heathrow (LHR)	2	2
3	Chicago Ohare Intl (ORD)	3	4
4	Charles de Gaulle (CDG)	6 (+2)	6
5	Munchen (MUC)	4 (-1)	30
6	Los Angeles Intl (LAX)	5 (-1)	7
7	Amsterdam-Schiphol (AMS)	8 (+1)	14
8	Atlanta-Hartsfield (ATL)	10 (+2)	1
9	New York-John F Kennedy Intl (JFK)	9	12
10	San Francisco Intl (SFO)	11 (+1)	20

No change in the top three, with Frankfurt still reigning supreme. Charles de Gaulle, new at 250k, has climbed up another two notches to number 4, and world #1 Atlanta has avoided the ignominy of falling off the list and moved up to a more secure perch at #8. On the other hand, Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental, which made it as high as #4 in the 100,000 stats, has now collapsed to #11. Still no sign of Beijing or Haneda, will this change now that HND is fielding more international flights?

What next?

The next job in the never-ending OpenFlights task queue is reworking our flight import system, which is a bit too buggy for comfort at the moment, but after that is autocompletion and, yes, that should finally include using previous flight data to suggest source and destination airports, plus possibly flight times as well. Stay tuned!

Looking forward to his first million,
-jani

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