Airports on the map, and a way into their pages
Last week every airport our receivers hear got its own page: the airports hub lists about fifteen hundred of them, each with flights heard over the last thirty days, a day-by-day chart and the facts from OurAirports. The pages existed, but the map didn't know about them. You could fly past Frankfurt and never learn that the network logs thousands of flights a month into it, unless you went looking in the directory.
So now the map shows them. On the big map in the game and on the shell map, a small blue marker with a plane sits on every airport that has a page. The busiest ones win when space is tight: zoomed out over Europe you see the hubs, and smaller fields appear as you zoom in. From zoom 5 the IATA code prints above the marker when there's room for it. If a city name already sits there, the code is dropped and the marker stays.
Tap a marker and a card opens with what we have:
- the airport's name, its IATA and ICAO codes, the city and country;
- Flights heard, last 30 days: how many scheduled flights into or out of it our receivers picked up, and on how many days;
- Catches through it: how many player catches were on a flight that touched this airport;
- elevation and longest runway, where OurAirports has them.
Numbers we never measured are left out rather than shown as zero. A field that only shows up in catches has no "flights heard" line, and that's correct.
The card has an "Open airport page" button that opens the full page in a new tab, so a running flight isn't thrown away. Next to it, ✈ takes you there: in the game you teleport straight to the airport, and on the shell map it starts a flight at its coordinates.
There is exactly one marker per page and no marker without one. The marker list comes from the same rows as the hub, so a marker never leads to a page that doesn't exist.
The layer is on by default. You can switch it off under Layers on either map ("Airports"), and like the other layer switches it's saved to your account. It hides itself while Sky Radar is scanning, the same as the other layers, so the aircraft blips stay easy to see.
One fix came along with this. The hub was reading airport positions from a table that never had any, so the "airports near" block on city pages had nothing to show. Positions now come from the daily census rows and from the routes of caught flights, which covers every airport with a page. The block should fill in on the next generator run.
Update, same day: live streams. Hamburg Airport has a public YouTube live stream. When a moderator marks a stream as on air, the airport's marker gets a small red dot, and both the map card and the airport page show a "Watch live on YouTube" button that opens the stream in a new tab. Streams go down from time to time. When that happens, a moderator unticks "on air" and the dot and the button disappear until it's back. Only YouTube links are accepted, and we don't embed the player: the stream stays on YouTube.