Direct Flights

Awesome visualization!

👋 Hi hunters! Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the flight display screens at the airport wondering where I can fly direct if I had an open ticket 🙃 There are more than 38 million commercial flights per year departing from +3,200 airports and served by +580 airlines! So much data that can be summarized and made accessible to everyone in an easy and convenient interface. Why? The motivation to build this project came while traveling and working remotely in Asia. I wanted to know where I can fly direct from Bali to renew my visa without a layover – I realized that most airport websites don't provide such information – while Skyscanner/Kayak/Google-Flights didn't have a weekly overview of flights with a focus on direct flights. What? With Direct Flights, you can browse all airlines and group them per alliance, country or main airport. You can discover the route map for a selected airport, sort the destinations by their minimum price or flight duration. And even dive into the flight schedule for a specific route (from Monday to Sunday) – group the result by aircraft model or airline. Audience with use cases - 🎒People with a flexible schedule and with a nomad lifestyle are the first target, as they can use the tool to be inspired for their next destination. - 💺Frequent travelers who are loyal to an airline can discover new destinations to redeem their miles on direct routes. - 🤓Curious minds and travel nerds who want to expand their knowledge on the commercial airlines and airports industry. Business model Direct Flights can be integrated as a B2B white label solution for airlines and airports so that passengers can discover new destinations in a more visual manner (Would love to discuss with anyone connected in this ecosystem). Moreover, there's a B2C aspect, where we get an affiliate commission for ticket sales through kiwi.com Where the data come from? At the moment, we are using kiwi.com API to query flight details for every route for the next 6 months. An algorithm selects the right date range based on the weekly flights for the route. @matthieuramo is in charge of crunching the data (across 12 tables and 68M rows). How it's made? The frontend is built on React - using a server-side rendering on NodeJS for SEO purposes. The backend is built in Python (using celery workers) and hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine. The map is rendered with HTML5 Canvas, while interactions with the zoom are managed with SVG (using some D3 plugins). Unique features ↑💬Dynamic social preview card: When you share a link on social media, it automatically generates a thumbnail by taking a screenshot of the visualization with live data. ↑🌍Showing flight routes on a 3D globe: Representing the earth as a 3D globe made more sense to visualize realistic flight routes instead of a distorted flat map (Pictured the world longest route between New York and Singapore in 18h30min – Flying across the north pole? 👀). ↑📍Select the closest airport to your cursor: It's very hard to nail the right airport on a map when there’s a cluster of items (especially for multi-airports areas like SF Bay Area). Direct Flights computes a Voronoi diagram (highlighted on the GIF) to have larger clickable areas. How you can help? - 👋Share your feedback and questions here. - ✈️If you can connect us to people who want to help their customers discover travel opportunities with a unique visualization. I would love to talk! - 📊If you have any tips or recommendations on how to market this project. I look forward to reading your comments and questions! I'll be around all day and will be more than happy to answer them all! Thanks for your support 🙏 Simo Special thanks to : - @matthieuramo for handling the data analysis. - @alexisfogel, @youcefhq, @stuerenault, @hanspagel for your constructive feedback. - @adrienm for hunting us. - @pmdartus for your performance audit.

HOLY SH***T This is major work, very nice product and a perfect fit for people exploring new destinations. Amazing work guys! Keep it up!

Cool, is it also possible to create something like this but for train trips?

@simoelalj very good job. Nice product with an amazing design! Well done. I will use it soon when I start my Nomad life!

Really love the idea - upvoted! Some things that would make me actually use it day to day. 1) When you hover over a connection it should really stand out, right now it just shows a pop-up and you can't really make it out from crowded ones. You could so a cool interaction at this point. 2) Be nice to be able to zoom the globe yourself, I couldn't see a control for that. 3) Where there's only one flight per day on one route and perhaps 140 on another, the one route flights isn't really visible with the colouring algorithm you're using. Maybe even a simple fix is to have a minimum color it can go to. That pale blue colouring of the line against a sea makes it invisible so maybe just changing the line from blue could also work 4) It's really well built engineering wise. If the design was jazzed up just a slight bit you would really kick on I think.

Woow! 🤯 Quite an unique experience in 3D! Just started my nomad life and love the complementary aspect with a traditional google flight product. Super straightforward and has tons of infos! Congrats to the whole team for such project 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼