Every airport our receivers hear now has a page
Until today, /airport/{code} existed only where somebody had caught a flight whose route ran through that airport. That covered a few dozen airports. The map, meanwhile, labels thousands of them, and tapping a label usually led nowhere.
Since 8 October the backend has been keeping a quiet census. Once a minute it looks at every airline flight our receivers can hear, reads the route published for its callsign, and notes which airport the flight is heading to and which one it left. One callsign counts once per airport per day. After four days that census already covers 1,469 airports.
Those airports now have pages. Each one shows:
- Arriving and departing: how many airline flight numbers our receivers heard heading to or from the airport over the last 30 days.
- Days heard: on how many of those days anything showed up at all.
- A chart, one bar per day, arrivals and departures stacked.
- Everything players caught there, as before: flights, aircraft types, airlines, connected airports, recent catches.
- A Fly here button that drops you into the sim over the runway.
The page also answers a few plain questions at the bottom: how busy the airport looks to our network, when we first heard a flight there, and whether anyone has caught one yet.
What the numbers are, and what they are not
They are callsigns per day, taken from published routes. They are not runway movements. A delayed flight that lands after midnight counts on the day we heard it, a charter flying under a callsign with no published route is invisible to us, and an airport far from any of our receivers can be busy and still show nothing. The count grows with the network: every new antenna adds the airports it can hear.
Which pages go into search
A page with four days of data is not much of a page, so new airports stay out of the search index at first. An airport gets indexed once players have caught three flights through it, or once the network has heard it on at least seven days with at least fifty flights in the 30-day window. 462 airports already have the flights. The first of them pass the seven-day mark around 15 October, and from then on the sitemap picks them up by itself.
Shared links
Pasting an airport link into Discord or Telegram now shows its own card with the arriving and departing counts instead of the site banner.
What comes next
Catching a flight to a new airport will start counting toward a collection of airports and countries, and receiver owners will see which airports their own antenna hears. Both build on the same census. If you feed us and want your area's airports on the map, the ADS-B network page explains how to connect.