Ports of call
Routes landed on the cards this morning. The obvious next question was whether a route is a collectible in its own right, with a rarity tier like the ones aircraft types carry. We measured before answering, and the answer turned out to be half yes.
What the measurement said
Taking every catch ever made on Skydex, 199 of them across three accounts, 194 wore an airline flight number. Those 194 are 170 distinct flight numbers, because the same service gets caught again on another day, and 143 of the 170 have a published route. That works out to 157 catches carrying an origin and a destination, and between them they touch 87 airports in 32 countries. The longest leg anyone has caught is Chicago to Baku, 9,918 km, on a Silk Way cargo run. The shortest is Copenhagen to Hamburg at 280. One airport, Hamburg, shows up in 79 of the 157, which is what an antenna sitting next to it looks like in a table.
The 27 flight numbers that don't resolve, 37 catches worth, are not missing data. They're Airbus factory flights, NetJets business jets, a US military airlift callsign, and a couple of rescue helicopters. None of those appear in a timetable and none ever will, so the collection says so out loud instead of showing them as something you haven't collected yet.
Why there's no rarity tier on a route
Three reasons, and the first is simply that we can't.
The flight database is a table of callsigns and airport pairs. It has no frequencies in it. Counting how often a pair appears counts callsigns, so a route flown twice a day and a one-off charter weigh exactly the same. A tier built on that would look measured and wouldn't be, which is the same mistake as the inverted tiers we spent a week pulling out of the restored dump.
The second: rarity here belongs to the aircraft type. Two days ago we rewrote every card title because a tier was being printed next to a flight number, and "VIR135G — LEGENDARY" was describing the wrong thing entirely. Adding a second rarity scale to the same catch would put the feed and the Discord alerts in the position of choosing which one to name.
The third is that a route is a timetable, not an observation. A ferry leg wearing an airline callsign gets you a route the aircraft didn't fly. Paying XP for that is paying for a table.
What you get instead
Coverage, and records. Open your aircraft dex and there's a Ports of call block: how many airports your catches have touched, how many countries, your longest leg, your shortest, and your home field. Those are all facts. Distances come from the airports' own coordinates, which are present on every row the database returns.
Each airport also has a page now, /airport/EDDH and the like, showing which flights through it people have caught, which aircraft types were flying them, which airlines, and where those flights also go. An airport gets a page once somebody catches a flight through it, and not before: there are about 34,000 airports in the upstream table, and a page whose whole content is a name and a coordinate helps nobody.
One thing worth being clear about: the count on an airport page is catches made by people using this site. It isn't traffic. A flight shows up there because somebody caught the aircraft and the callsign it wore had a published route.
Old catches got their routes filled in by a backfill rather than staying blank, so the collection starts with those 87 airports rather than at zero. That ran this morning: 194 ledger rows, no lookup failures.