Flights to Rome | Hacker News Reader

Flights to Rome

flightstorome.moovellab.com

302 pointsanc84106 comments

I’ve been collecting GPS tracks of all the commercial flights I’ve been on for the past several years, using a little pocket receiver.

It’s been pretty interesting data, from seeing how ATC works differently from country to country (China is nuts - a flight from Beijing to Hong Kong will have hundreds of course changes to minimise overflight of populated areas), to how airports stack traffic, to where GPS jammers are being operated - many large airports seem to have a curtain of interference, presumably to stop drone intrusions. It’s also interesting seeing things like routes dog-legging around Ukraine, or ascending to a very high level to overfly Afghanistan - apparently pot-shots by armed groups are of not insignificant concern.

So far it’s only a few hundred flights, but it’s still pretty neat.

Neat indeed; you seem to have discovered lots of interesting tidbits.

Of all you mention, two are extremely surprising to me, and I'm not even sure which is more - China course corrections and GPS jamming. The former sounds straight out of Cold War counterespionage playbook. In this day and age, why would they bother? The latter... again, are drones really that big of an issue to justify the jammers (and, presumably, legal clearance for jamming GPS)?

I'm not sure that it's fair to infer that China's course corrections are to avoid espionage. Google Maps satellite view will show you far more, for far less money. And military areas are of far more concern for espionage than cities.

I suspect the reroutes are more for noise reasons, though I am not certain.

Could it be concerns about planes crashing into populated areas?

That is so rare you don't really plan for it.

Most Chinese airspace is managed by the Chinese military, and military flights take priority. So that may be a reason why as well. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/10/30/why-chin...

> The latter... again, are drones really that big of an issue to justify the jammers (and, presumably, legal clearance for jamming GPS)?

If birds are that big of an issue, would drones not be, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike

A few hundred flights in several years? I'm jealous! What is your line of work if I may ask?

Not OP, but my busiest year was 2014 was 119 flights. 6 were in business, all of those were upgrades (once on miles, the others were upgraded at the gate due to overselling down the back)

Fortunately most of the long haul flights were in premium economy, about 26,000 miles were in economy.

2013 was only 112 flights, but longer than 2014, 163k miles. I was luckier that year with upgrades for work, and did a few leisure trips which were in business/first.

By 2015 I was getting tired of hotels and jet planes. Still knocked up 57 flights and 121k miles. 80% of those miles were in business or first though, which made it more bearable.

There's a certain type of person who sustains hundreds of flights a year, year after year (which IME means half the time you're staying in a hotel somewhere), most of those that I know are either under 30, or they're divorced.

Jealous? I unfortunately have about 50-60 flights in a couple of years. And that is too much. The airport and air travel experience is really not very good. Add to it the emissions. I personally would prefer less flights and more effective work. Where are the great AR conference facilities?

High level business/tech consultancy these days - although 90% of the travel is me picking cheap and weird flights in order to get to cheap and weird corners of the world while I figure out where to start the next business, and because I have a hunch that it may not be so easy to travel in the not-too-distant future. For instance, I just did a nine day trip for the sake of it, flew from UK to Amsterdam, a night there, flew to Porto Alegre (Brazil), spent two nights there, flew to Montevideo, spent three nights there, flew to BA, spent a night there, flew to Lisbon, two nights there, then home. £450 airfare, total - for two of us, as we booked it as a series of long-layover low-demand flights. Now I’m in Poland. Latvia this morning, Istanbul last week, Istanbul again in a few weeks after a bit of Belarus (London to Riga via Istanbul isn’t very direct, but it was dirt cheap) - and then I’ll hibernate for a month as as fun as seeing new places is, air travel is pretty miserable in and of itself.

It’s cheaper than staying at home - Airbnb the apartment out while I’m not there, and it usually covers the travel costs.

What do you use to book those long layover flights?

Skyscanner, google flights - I’ll usually have an ultimate destination in mind (e.g. Montevideo), and will then either find an acceptably cheap series of flights by turning off most of the filters, or setting up price alerts. Sometimes I’ll book months in advance, sometimes it’ll be “pack your bags, we’re going to Vladivostok... today!”

Also, my wife scours sites like https://www.holidaypirates.com/ which occasionally have some steals of deals.

Frankly the hardest bit has been organising catsitting.

    I have a hunch that it may not be so easy to travel in the not-too-distant future

That's an interesting hunch. Can I get you to elaborate?

What countries have you seen GPS jamming in? And if in the US, which airports?

If in North America, I suspect there’s another explanation for what you’ve seen given the degree to which civilian air traffic relies on GPS for navigation, including for precision approaches at many airports.

Jamming - Brazil, Argentina, Russia, China, and there’s a small dead zone in the UK over the Brecon Beacons.

Intriguing, I wonder what could be the reason for and source of jamming over the Brecon Beacons?

One possible explanation is that your GPS receiver front-end was overloaded by transmissions from Woofferton transmitting station[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woofferton_transmitting_statio...

Brecon beacons are a training ground for UK special forces soldiers - maybe either testing their ability to cope with jamming, or testing their offensive jamming equipment?

Allegedly, airports' coordinates are hard coded into consumer drones' firmware, at least in Russia. That's the reason why gps devices at Moscow Kremlin walls think, that they are at VKO airport. So jamming gps signal in the airports seems counterproductive. I would think that they'd want drones to know they are in a no-flight zone.

Is the in-flight map often fictional data then?

Not necessarily. Even without GPS, commercial airliners have a good idea of where they are using their INSes (inertial navigation systems). That technology well predates GPS receivers being common in aircraft. Most of the Boeing and Airbus aircraft you fly, for example, have 3 INSes and probably 2 GPS receivers. All of the data feeds into the computers to average to the position the plane thinks it's actually at. When the GPS signal is reliable, that may be used as the actual position and can be used to keep the INS drift minimized, so if the GPS signal is lost (or the receivers malfunction), the INS takes over as the primary source of position data. This is all further supplemented and verified with radio navigation aids -- as the planes fly along their routes, the airplane computers automatically tune in to various radio navigation aids. In short, even for the newest big commercial jets, functional GPS is very much optional and positional data is quite good without it.

As for the moving maps on the seat-back displays: I guess it all depends on the data source they use. If they have their own GPS receiver for the plane's "entertainment" system, that doesn't get the computed current position from the real navigation systems, then the map would presumably stop working or make up (e.g. interpolate) data from when it last had good position data.

But now that I think about it... I've only ever seen those maps draw the route as the great-circle path from the departure airport to the destination airport. So they're fictional in that regard -- whether they're interpolating the position on the great-circle path as a percentage of the actual track distance flown and remaining from the real navigation data, or doing something even more fictional, I don't know.

It varies between airlines - off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you which does what, but some are completely accurate, others are essentially a great circle progress bar - and they always turn it off for the interesting bits around takeoff and landing.

> But now that I think about it... I've only ever seen those maps draw the route as the great-circle path from the departure airport to the destination airport. So they're fictional in that regard -- whether they're interpolating the position on the great-circle path as a percentage of the actual track distance flown and remaining from the real navigation data, or doing something even more fictional, I don't know.

Very interesting. Thanks for the detailed answer. Next time I'll make sure to record the position information independently as well. For some reason I had just taken their great-circle path at its face value and never questioned it. In hindsight, it was all too perfect. :)

What device do you use?

I don't see why any of the off the shelf GPS trackers for things like hiking wouldn't work just fine. One of the hundreds of cellphone apps that do this would probably suffice too.

Garmin make a ton of cheapish GPS trackers in lines like eTrex etc as well, but given cellphone battery life now being so good the need for such a thing is much less than it once was.

Which device did you use? I always thought consumer devices were supposed to disable themselves above certain altitudes and/or speeds to prevent them being used in cruise missiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Mul...)

Airliners don't go over 1,200MPH or above 59,000 feet...

Airplanes broadcast their location using ADS-B. Using an SDR hooked up to a raspberry pi, you can get in on the action.

www.flightradar24.com

I would recommend something like adsbexchange instead, which ignores any filtering lists.... Information wants to be free?

Just a Garmin eTrex 20 - OSM maps, runs off (rechargeable) AAs - happily lasts 18 or more hours, although I do have to have a window seat on non-composite airliners.

An iphone will capture GPS on a plane just fine, although don't wedge it in the window shade - it will soon overhear.

Interesting, I encountered that kind of strangeness aboard a Paris-Moscow, where my phone GPS tracker pointed me earth level in Pulkovo airport (Saint-Petersburg, Russia). I estimated I was over Belarus at that time.

I never got to the why of this behavior.

I did a screenshot of that event here https://ibb.co/eCrV9y

From the same makers the Roads to Rome is also interesting: http://roadstorome.moovellab.com/countries

Try step 3. Explore. Search for your city with the magnifying glass, and see where you can walk, bike or drive in 15 to 30 minutes from your house or office.

Wow, it's taking very long to compute (server side I imagine), easy on it future clickers.

Really cool idea, but boy is that tool hard to use. I first ended up with a point A and B and no obvious way to get rid of B. The worst thing is that it keeps rubber banding back to Hamburg for some reason.

This is utterly beautiful - thank you. I made a very primitive interactive (WebGL) version a couple of years ago (not going to link here - always feels rude to drop links in someone else's post) but this takes it to a whole new level and then some.

I love all the analysis too as well as the gorgeous visuals. I'd definitely purchase a print for my office wall if you ever decide to offer that.

I didn't see any link to anything of the sort, but I'd love to have a large print of one of these maps.

The link to the 3D visualization is quite obvious.

Yah, but I don't really want to steal their work without their permission...

Comparing printing out part of a web page for your own personal use with stealing something is just odd. What if you frame it and turn it round to face the wall when you have guests?

It is not forbidden nor "stealing" to print out for personal use.

Does it actually say that on the site? I can't find anything saying so.

In the US it would be considered fair use if you print a website's content for personal use. Maybe you'd want to use the laws in the country that produced this content (Germany), in which case I believe it'd fall under freie Benutzung. I'm not an expert in German copyright law, but it seems to me that even in Germany, if you're printing content for personal use and not distributing it or selling it or modifying it, you're in the clear.

> In the US it would be considered fair use if you print a website's content for personal use.

I don't think that's true.

But...

What's interesting about web sites is that visiting them makes a digital copy for personal use. That copying (in your browser and on your monitor) might be covered by the site's EULA, or it might not. If the site's permissions aren't granted explicitly, or they don't differentiate between visiting and printing, the bounds would seem to be gray and a suit against someone printing something from a website they visited might be hard to win.

>I don't think that's true.

Everyone in this thread is saying "I think so" or "I don't think so" and no one seems to be able to find any concrete evidence saying it is or is not illegal. I find that to be interesting.

I posted concrete evidence in this thread. I was just being non-aggressive and diplomatic in my wording here.

It's also useful to stay a least a little bit vague, because we're not discussing very specific cases, people are asking general questions and making general statements. Whether or not something will get you into trouble is not something you can answer definitively without actually litigating the issue in court. Fair use has gray areas.

* Edit, just to attempt make this more concrete: "personal use" is not an allowed exception under US copyright law, unless you're using it strictly for backups (fair use). But "Flights to Rome" isn't a US work, the website is authored by Germans, and hosted in Ireland on an AWS server owned by a US corporation but subject to both local and international laws. It's likely that the Berne Convention governs this example. In any case, it's safest to assume you can't copy the material legally.

FWIW, it doesn't need to say so. Maybe that's what you meant? If the site gives no explicit permission, copying is not allowed. There's no requirement to have notice of copyright, no requirement to file for copyright, and no excuse for copying something you don't have the right to copy. Under US & German copyright laws, all works are automatically protected as soon as they're created, with the rights defaulting exclusively to the creator of the work. Unless you have explicit permission (which includes public domain & public license like Creative Commons) or you are copying under fair use, you don't have the right to copy anything legally.

> FWIW, it doesn't need to say so. Maybe that's what you meant? If the site gives no explicit permission, copying is not allowed.

Yeah, the parent commenter was saying you CAN print it for personal use, so me asking "Does it actually say that on the site?", the 'that' is "printing for personal use is okay". Either way I think we're in agreement, just because it's for personal use doesn't automatically make it "fair use".

* I want it for our office.

* Generally speaking, putting something onto the internet doesn't entitle you to make reproductions/copies/prints for your personal use, at least in US law and I believe in most European jurisdictions. You can usually see this with photographers who may sell you the rights to your photos in addition to/alongside any physical or digital prints they sell you.

IANAL, but hot damn is this community aggressive to people suggesting they would pay for things.

I don't think anyone here is being aggressive, generally people on HN are positive towards paying for things. The argument here isn't "pay for it or don't pay for it", it's "do you actually need to pay for it before printing it for your own consumption".

Until you mentioned it was for your office, the answer was no [1]. You printing something linked online would not violate the four factors determining Fair Use (at least in US law).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corp.

Displaying it publicly in a place of business may run afoul of fair use though.

That case references reproductions of thumbnail images for search engines and lays out the criteria under which a fair use is judged, and people who are casually reading your comment shouldn't take it as a definitive judgement about legality.

For some extended commentary on what fair use is, https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-... is pretty good.

While you're unlikely to be sued for printing off something you don't have the right to make a copy of, you definitely don't have the right to make prints of whatever you find on the internet.

>you definitely don't have the right to make prints of whatever you find on the internet

If you have any references that say that, I'd love to see them. Specifically, I'd like to see anything that says that printing a contents of a publicly accessible website for personal use and not to distribute or sell is a violation of copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but everything I read in the Wikipedia article I linked to says otherwise.

The printed version would be transformative, the image is from a published work, and printing it does not harm the market value of the image. That's why I linked it, because it's substantially the same argument.

This reminds me of the copyright note at the bottom of most pages by Ken: https://kenrockwell.com/nikon/index.htm (see the last paragraph of "Help Me Help You" section)

"As this page is copyrighted and formally registered, it is unlawful to make copies, especially in the form of printouts for personal use. If you wish to make a printout for personal use, you are granted one-time permission only if you PayPal me $5.00 per printout or part thereof. Thank you!"

I think it's more of a general hostility to copyright rather than not wanting to pay for things.

> It is not forbidden nor "stealing" to print out for personal use.

Why do you think that? Are you talking about German or US copyright law? Can you cite the law you're thinking of?

"[US] Copyright law does not contain any caveat that allows unauthorized parties to make personal copies of copyrighted products. However, under the doctrine of 'fair use,' individuals may be permitted to make backup copies or archival copies of some materials as long as certain conditions are met. Creating a copy of a copyrighted work for your own ease of use is likely to be considered copyright infringement. But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use."

https://info.legalzoom.com/copyright-law-making-personal-cop...

So your point is that a screenshot (one frame) of a movie that is copyright protected would be equivalent to reproducing the movie...?

> So your point is that a screenshot (one frame) of a movie that is copyright protected would be equivalent to reproducing the movie...?

No, my point is that "personal use" is not an exception to copyright law. Where did you read something about equating screenshots of movies with full movies?

You are not allowed to copy entire movies and claim it's legal because it's only for "personal use".

Screenshots are sometimes legal under fair use, mostly as long as you are making a parody or commentary.

Screenshots of movies are sometimes illegal. If you somehow had access to the next Avengers movie, and you leaked a screenshot by posting it to reddit, you might well get sued under copyright law.

Copying images from a web site falls into the same restrictions. It is not automatically legal to reproduce images from a website without permission, even for personal use.

>But if you are making a copy so that you may use a copyrighted product in case the original is stolen, damaged or destroyed, your conduct may fall within the doctrine of fair use

That to me sounds like you can print something since web content can disappear at any moment.

You can try to justify it that way, but if you print it and then hang it on your wall, or in your office, to enjoy it as art, like @estsauver wants to do, then you might no longer be in the realm of fair use, you might even be squarely in copyright violation territory.

Yea, just get an old screen, hang it on the wall, and display the image directly from their site. tada!

there are a few UI issues with the website itself, but these maps are quite beautiful.

Oh man, those tilt-shift 3d visualisations...drool

In the first image why are all the flights from Madagascar stopping at an intermediate island between it and mainland Africa?

Because the algorithm seems to be wrong. It prefers to make several small "hops" over long direct flights. For example Phoenix - Albuquerque - Denver - Winnipeg(?) - Iqualuit - somewhere in Greenland - Reykjavik - Glasgow seems like a very popular route and the whole West US is using it to reach Rome.

A bit off topic but why did you have to fill my browser history while I scroll through a page?

I don't know if this is happening only to my browser (Firefox nightly on Android) but it's very annoying.

Same problem on Firefox for Windows here. To make matters even worse, there was a bug where the back button just kept me cycling between two different sections of the page. I kept hopping back and forth no matter how many times I hit back, and could never go back to HN.

Please, please, don't break the user experience this way.

You can hold the back button until it extends a menu that lets you go back more places. Still not enough for some sites but often a good rescue.

Also on Safari (iPhone).

Thanks, will avoid visiting this site.

Who cares what you read or not read?

Why should the rest of the world care about anything anyone ever says

I would still visit the site, I think the analysis and graphs are interesting. If you open the link in a new tab, it doesn't really matter what the site does with your back button.

Yes, the back button was broken on macOS/Chrome for me, too, with an endless cycle between the first two sections. If I didn't click it, it shouldn't be in my history.

Just a note to Chrome users, when you click and hold on the back button, you can see a history - just click the site you want to get back to.

The same functionality is also available on Firefox (both desktop and android).

Unless you play with a page long enough that it becomes your entire visible backward history, requiring multiple hold-and-click rounds to get the hell away from a single page.

I've seen this on a number of list sites and a few more general publishing sites - as you scroll past each point your history is updated. I've taken to either opening such links in a new tab ("true back" then returns to being a single operation: close tab) or not opening them at all.

I can understand people are annoyed by this, but do we really need 2/3ds of the comments here reiterating the same point? Someone already made it, upvote it or skip the article for all I care, but I'd rather read a discussion about the piece than people's buttons not working.

I think it’s acceptable because the alternative is authors who make this exceedingly dumb and user-hostile choice would have to see the upvotes to recognize how much people hate this. Instead, if authors read a bunch of complaints about this happening with their work, perhaps they’ll learn not to do it because they’d rather read more interesting comments about their work. When 2/3 of the comments are complaining about how an author rendered user back buttons useless out of either carelessness or ignorance, I’d hope the author would pay attention.

The link is the topic of discussion. On a place like HN the article's technical aspects are as valid of topics as the article's content. Additionally the overwhelming majority of the posts I've seen on HN don't have threads like this, so it's not like it's an epidemic. It only pops up for links that are doing something dumb.

My Android back button and this page did not get along.

It is screwed on the desktop too.

Same on iOS

Also iOS. Can’t stand sites that do this. I have 5 entries in my history for the same page and all I did was scroll.

Came to this thread just to make sure complaints about navigation were the top comments.

This is how I know I’ve found my people.

#embraceYourBubble ;)

NoScript FTW.

Same on macOS with Chrome

Trust me, you are not doing justice to these visuals by browsing this site on a phone.

Same on Windows and Chrome

This webpage breaks the back button on Android Chrome. Couldn't come back to HN

On all browsers (with history api’s) most likely, looks like they are multiple entries without replacing one.

As you scroll through the site it seems to re-set the current page for each section, which was totally unexpected behavior to me.

Likely a history.pushState vs history.replaceState bug (they want the latter)

Why would you want to leave in the first place?

So many of the top comments on HN posts are complaints about website functionality rather than the content of the site. I'm all for not breaking standards but sometimes it gets old when the top content is a negative content about the use of javascript or ux. Bracing for downvotes

You're right, and it's a long running problem. See what dang says here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238739

> A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing.

> I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.

Agreed, I’m going to start flagging such comments because they really harm the quality of discussion. If I lose my flagging privileges as a result, so be it.

I often check out comments and use that to decide whether to go to the actual link.

A high ranked complaint about website functionality can help me make that decision, and I am happy to upvote complaints that would sway me.

Maybe, after enough shaming, the people who break browsers will stop doing so

Nice images. But the author has no idea what he is trying to say.

Somehow I doubt anyone is flying to Rome via Iceland. Even if there's no direct flight, people would go through London, Paris, Madrid or another big hub.

Why? Iceland Air offers some of the cheapest flights across the Atlantic - I've stopped there on my way to Paris several times. And you can take a few days as a stopover for nothing, which is a nice way to arrive at your final destination already unjetlagged.

With the great circle route it's not that far out of the way (especially from the west coast of the US) and Iceland Air has some great deals. If you spend a night in Iceland, you can get some crazy cheap flights.

Ok, but did you make a stop at Baffin Island like the map suggests? Also one airline couldn't possibly carry all traffic from the Western US to Europe. And Keflavik International Airport doesn't look like it can carry all this traffic either.

I was looking into some transatlantic flights a few days ago. The cheapest one had a 20 hour layover in Iceland, which for a vacation type/no rush flight would be awesome.

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