The world doesn’t fly on Prague time
Aviation itself runs on a single clock. Pilots, controllers and flight plans all speak UTC, which on the radio is called Zulu, and in summer it is two hours behind the watches in Prague. A passenger, though, reads the departure board in the time of the airport they are standing in.
From the first day, map.flights has been made for the whole world. A departure board in Tokyo shows Tokyo time, whoever is looking and wherever they are. City names follow the reader’s language, and so do numbers, dates and the decimal comma.
Units are the same story. In most of the world an aircraft’s altitude is given in feet and its speed in knots, yet China counts its flight levels in metres, and a passenger in the United States thinks in miles per hour. So map.flights has three systems, aviation, metric and American, and you can switch them in the menu or right in the aircraft panel.
Czech is the default only for Czech and Slovak visitors. Everyone else gets English, unless their browser asks for one of the other eleven languages. Since 20 August each language has its own address, so a search engine shows the Lisbon airport page in Portuguese and Kraków in Polish.
The dictionary was the easy part
In Czech it is 1 letadlo, 2 letadla, but 5 letadel. In Polish both 2 and 22 are samoloty, yet 12 is samolotów. Russian and Ukrainian put a number ending in one into the singular, so it is 21 самолёт but 11 самолётов. A Frenchman says 0 avion, in the singular, while an Englishman says 0 planes. That is why every language got its own plural rules, and a sentence is assembled only once they have spoken.
Norwegian has two written standards and we write bokmål. Russian and Ukrainian use Cyrillic, German has words that don’t fit on a button, and French needs a third more room than Czech on the very same buttons.
Every feature, thirteen times
On 29 September the site carried 7,827 texts, and every language has exactly as many. A new feature brings new buttons, notes and error messages, and each of them is translated, checked on the screen and tried with its plurals. Altogether that came to just over 900,000 words. French needs the most of them, Czech the fewest, and Ukrainian comes surprisingly close to Czech.
Mnichov, München or Munich
Search understands city names in the reader’s language. Type Mnichov, München or Munich and you get the same airport. Of the 150 busiest airports, 145 have the name of their city in Czech as well.
The name doesn’t come from the airport’s own name but from the city it serves. Charles de Gaulle airport lies in the commune of Tremblay-en-France, yet nobody flies to Tremblay. They fly to Paris, so that is where you will find it.
And the little receiver box that someone builds at home speaks even more: its own page comes in fifteen languages, Japanese and Chinese included. Our stations already stand in Japan too.
No feature ships before it exists in all thirteen languages, with the right plural in every one of them.