Skip to the page
Amber Almanac(402) 488-6215
A stone bridge of several identical arches crossing a wide slow river, grey water, bare trees

three grades of certainty, and which of them the number under the fields belongs to

What the box works out, and what it guesses at

Air time is the one figure in this almanac that a traveler rarely controls and usually underestimates, which is why a box that prices flights had better be honest about which parts of its answer are measured and which are guessed.

1

Three grades, and everything the box says belongs to one

Known exactly
The two airport codes, the two dates, the cabin letter and the count of seats. These are what you typed, and they travel unchanged.
Estimated
The distance and the hours in the air. Measured from two stored positions and a fixed cruising speed, with no timetable behind it.
Cannot be known here
The fare, the routing, the connection, the aircraft, whether the day is a good one to fly, and whether any of it is available at all.

Everything printed under the fields is in the middle grade, and the wording there says so. A number in the middle grade dressed as one from the top grade is the failure worth avoiding, and it is the ordinary failure of flight widgets everywhere.

How the estimate is made, exactly

Latitude and longitude ride along with every entry in the airport list, good to five kilometers or so. Pick both ends and the shortest path over the globe between those two points is computed, then turned into time:

Cruising speed
500 miles an hour, flat
Fixed allowance
Forty minutes, standing in for climb, approach and taxi
Not included
Wind, routing, holding, connections, or the two hours you spend on the ground before any of it starts

Fly nonstop and reality will sit close to the figure. Route through a connecting airport and it will not, and nothing in this box can tell in advance which of the two you will be offered. That gap is the reason the almanac's own air-time order carries a warning of its own about connection risk.

Where the answer is put

The number alone would be trivia. What makes it worth printing is that this almanac already ranks all twenty four trips by hours aloft, so the box says where your route falls in that ranking: how many trips are shorter, how many are longer, and which one it lands beside.

That is the whole point of it. A reader who learns their route is nine hours has learned something; a reader who learns it is nine hours and that fourteen trips here are shorter has learned what to do next. The order itself is here.

Who receives it

Nothing you press here arrives at this desk. It arrives at a booking company, an entirely separate firm, met over a subdomain this site lends to it and nothing more. Every part of the transaction belongs to that firm: the figure, the seat, the payment page, the ticket and the conditions printed on it. Should you end up buying, part of a margin that firm had priced long beforehand is passed back to this office, funded from its side and never from yours.

The eighteen characters

Lincoln to Reykjavik, out on the second of June, home on the eleventh, economy, two seats:

LNK0206KEF1106200

Characters one to three
The airport it leaves
Four to seven
The outbound, day then month
Eight to ten
The airport it reaches
Eleven to fourteen
The return, written the same way
Fifteen
The cabin, and it may be empty: w premium economy, c business class, f first class
Sixteen to eighteen
Seats for adults, then children of two through eleven, then infants riding on a lap

Seventeen there because economy takes no letter. Eighteen at its longest, thirteen for a single leg. A string shaped like that has nowhere to put a person, which is a fact about its shape and not a promise anyone has to keep.

The side of the line your details stay on

Your name
No field exists for it
Any way of replying to you
None
A card
No field on this site would accept the digits
What you wrote in the request form elsewhere
Reaches this office alone and is unreadable to the box
The distance it worked out
Calculated where you are sitting and sent nowhere at all

The airport list is fetched once, the first time you type. Nothing else is asked of the network until the button is pressed.

Seven ways it declines

The button will not work until its script has loaded, and it looks unavailable rather than pretending readiness. Give the far end something it cannot read and a bare page comes back, saying rather less than an outright no would have.

An airport written out but never taken from the offered list. Both ends the same. A day already behind us. A return dated ahead of the departure, a case the second field resolves on its own by going blank as soon as the first one passes it. A tenth passenger occupying a seat. A lap infant with no adult booked alongside. And any date past eleven months.

The horizon at eleven months, and what sets it

The dates in that string get four characters each: a day and a month, and nothing for the year.

Within twelve months only one June can be meant. Beyond that the string is not wrong but filled in for you: ask about a date fifteen months out and the near June is assumed, live figures return for it, and no part of the screen mentions the substitution. Eleven months is the last point at which four characters read one way.

Two jobs it does not have

It does not quote a trip. Every figure in this almanac is a starting price per person and no seat on an aircraft sits inside one.

And it does not choose. Choosing is what the five orders are for, and it begins at the request form.