News nobody announced
Airlines plan their timetables months ahead and announce a new route with a press release, usually just before the first flight. A return to the departure airport or a landing somewhere else gets no press release at all. We see both. When aircraft start flying from Los Angeles to Bogotá week after week, a news item appears: a new route, with the day of the first flight, how often it runs, who flies it and a link to the live connection.
The hard part is not finding new routes, it is not finding false ones. At the end of August the data showed over nine thousand pairs of airports with a ‘first ever’ flight in two weeks. After checking, 61 were left. A lone charter or an aircraft returning from maintenance is not news.
In the two weeks to 29 September our data showed 42 new routes.
Returns, diversions and 7700
In the raw data, around eight thousand flights a day land somewhere other than where they seemed to be heading. Almost all of them are noise: a stopover, a wrongly guessed destination, a training circuit. What survives the checks is about thirty a day. Returns to the departure airport add roughly another ten.
Emergency codes get the same care. A crew sets 7700 on the transponder for a general emergency and 7600 when the radio fails, and the aircraft lights up on every controller’s screen in range. Most of these end with an ordinary landing. We log a code only once it is held over several messages in a row, because a single flicker would turn a healthy flight into an emergency.
And we never guess the cause. Each entry says when, where and how long. For a diversion we add the weather report from the planned destination at that time, as an observation, not an explanation. Circling in a holding pattern is something we don’t try to spot at all: from the data it looks exactly like a detour around a storm.
Every story from the airport’s side
Press releases come in too, from airports and airlines around the world. The starting list had 42 verified sources, and each one goes live only when a person switches it on. If a site says it doesn’t want to be read automatically, we take it at its word.
Every story needs a date before it gets anywhere. Old news is dropped, and so is anything we can’t date. The same release published in another language is recognised as a copy, and a story we have already written won’t be written twice.
The map.flights newsroom picks the stories that matter to travellers and spotters and hangs most of them on a place: an airport, an airline or an aircraft type. That is where the angle comes from. A story about Ostrava gets Ostrava’s own numbers and a link to its live board, a story about SAS links to its fleet. Nothing is written from Prague just because we happen to be based there. Where we can, we add what the network itself saw at that airport or with that airline.
The photo is never taken from the source; a story about an airport gets our own photo of that airport. And under the text there is a list of sources with their names, links and dates of publication, so anyone can check where each sentence came from.
The last word is human
Every draft goes through an editorial check: facts against the source text, dates, names and numbers. Then a person reads it, and publishing is a human decision. What stays is what changes a trip or a day at the fence: a new route, a returning flight, a new aircraft on the stand.
Each item then goes out in all thirteen languages of the site. When a published story is corrected, its translations are withdrawn and written again, because an out-of-date translation would be telling something the original no longer says.
Nobody sends out a press release about a return to the departure airport. Since the start of September our network has seen more than fifteen hundred of them, counting diversions and emergency codes.