✈ Where to fly direct
Live at https://www.wheretoflydirect.com
Pick any airport and see every nonstop destination on a map. Or search an airline to map its whole network. Click any route to see who flies it, the flight numbers seen this week, typical takeoff times and the aircraft used.
Stack: plain HTML/CSS/JS + Leaflet, a bundled Natural Earth world map (no tile service or API key), deployed as a static site on Vercel. Data refreshes weekly via GitHub Actions.
Accessibility
- Everything on the map is also in the panel: lists are real buttons, route details are a readable page with proper tables, so the site works by keyboard and screen reader.
- Search is an ARIA combobox (arrow keys + Enter); result counts are announced; focus moves to each new heading; Esc or the browser Back button goes back.
- Text sized in rem (browser zoom works), WCAG AA contrast, visible focus rings, 44px touch targets, honours reduced-motion.
- Settings for km/miles and 12/24-hour time (remembered per browser). On phones the list and map switch with tabs.
- Checked with axe-core (WCAG 2.1 AA + best practices): no violations.
Security
- No third-party code: Leaflet 1.9.4 and the fonts are served from
public/vendor/ (copied from npm), so nothing outside this site can run on the page.
vercel.json sets a Content-Security-Policy that only allows this site's own files, plus nosniff, referrer, permissions and anti-framing headers.- Data files can only be read by pages on www.wheretoflydirect.com (the site itself) (CORS + Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy). This stops other sites using them in their visitors' browsers; it can't stop someone downloading them directly.
- To test header changes, push to a branch first: Vercel builds a private preview.
Analytics
Vercel Web Analytics (cookieless) counts page views. On the free plan it can't record button clicks, so outbound links go to /go/prices/BKK-CNX (or /go/schedule/BKK-CNX/TG), a tiny page on this site that forwards to Google Flights. Each visit there is a page view, so the Analytics "Pages" list shows clicks per route. public/go.js is also the one place to change if the links ever go to a booking partner.
Licence
Site code: © 2026 Noobie502, all rights reserved (LICENSE). Built data in public/data/: ODbL 1.0 (DATA-LICENSE.md). Leaflet (BSD-2) and the fonts (OFL) keep their own licences.
Data
| What | Source | Freshness |
|---|
| Routes, carriers, scheduled flight time | Jonty/airline-route-data (scraped from FlightsFrom.com; operating carriers only, no codeshares) | weekly |
| Flights seen, aircraft types, takeoff times | adsb.lol ADS-B history (ODbL) | last 7 days |
| Aircraft for routes not seen in tracking | OpenFlights (ODbL) | 2014, labelled as such |
How flights are derived from tracking (scripts/observed.py):
- Each aircraft's daily track is split into legs; a leg's ends are matched to airports (within 10 km if seen low, 60 km if first/last seen mid-climb because of patchy receiver coverage).
- The callsign (e.g.
THA661) gives the airline; scripts/airline_icao_extra.json maps regional operators to the brands they fly for (e.g. Envoy → American).
- A flight only counts if it matches a known route for that airline, which weeds out positioning and training flights.
- Flights airborne at midnight UTC are stitched across consecutive days.
- Takeoff times are local to the departure airport. Gate departure is usually 10–25 minutes earlier.
Data checks done on every build (scripts/build_data.py prints a report):
- Routes: routes with no airline are dropped; duplicate entries merged; routes faster than any airliner over long distances are dropped (the source occasionally points at the wrong airport, e.g. a Myanmar route tagged with Noosa, Australia); impossible flight times are replaced by the return flight's time or an estimate; outbound/return times that disagree wildly (usually a time-zone slip) are averaged.
- Countries: one everyday name per country (the source mixes "USA" and "United States", which broke the "international only" filter).
- Aircraft: light aircraft, helicopters and business jets are ignored; an aircraft type is dropped if the route is beyond its range or it was a one-off mis-tag (e.g. a single Dash 8 sighting on a 787 route); one-day flights numbered 5000+ (charters, positioning) are skipped.
- Flights whose radio call sign isn't a flight number (e.g.
RYR8HG) are shown as call signs.
- Takeoff times were spot-checked against published timetables (SQ 308, TG 916, TG 102): they match actual takeoff, 20–40 min after the timetable departure.
Limits: coverage depends on volunteer receivers, so some regions (parts of Africa, Central Asia, oceans) have gaps; those routes fall back to 2014 aircraft data or show "not seen".
Building the data
mkdir -p data-src/openflights
curl -sSfLo data-src/airline_routes.json https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jonty/airline-route-data/main/airline_routes.json
for f in airports routes airlines planes; do
curl -sSfLo data-src/openflights/$f.dat https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jpatokal/openflights/master/data/$f.dat
done
scripts/fetch_observed.sh data-src/airline_routes.json data-src/observed 7 # ~4 GB per day, streamed
python3 scripts/build_data.py data-src/airline_routes.json data-src/observed data-src/openflights public/data
The world map only needs rebuilding if you change it:
npm i world-atlas@2 topojson-client@3
node scripts/build_world.mjs node_modules/world-atlas/countries-50m.json public/data/world.json
.github/workflows/refresh-data.yml runs all of this every Monday and commits the result, which Vercel then deploys. You can also run it by hand from the Actions tab.
Run locally
npx serve public
Ideas
- Two-airport mode: "where can we both fly?" or one-stop connections
- Filter by alliance or aircraft type ("where can I fly on an A380?")
- Live "in the air now" layer from the adsb.lol API
