Latest 1 October 2026
Updates
Latest updates on Orthodrome.
1 October 2026
Airport search by size and major airports on the map
Airport search now puts the biggest airport first. Draw legs and Leg cards rank their suggestions by airport size, so london starts with Heathrow and Gatwick instead of London, Ontario, and paris with Charles de Gaulle and Orly. Enter takes the first suggestion, so a city name is often all you need to type. An exact code still stays in the first two suggestions: bar gives Barcelona first and then Qionghai, whose code is BAR. The ICAO / IATA setting decides which kind of code counts as the exact match.
City codes and accents. Metropolitan codes such as LON, PAR, NYC and TYO suggest that city’s airports, so nyc lists JFK, Newark and LaGuardia. Accents no longer matter either: krakow finds Kraków. See Draw legs in the guide.
Major airports stand out on the map. Airports with at least 15 million passengers a year, about 150 of them, are drawn in an accent colour, and the ones with 40 million or more also get a ring. Other airports are smaller, quieter dots. Major codes appear already at continental zoom, other IATA codes when you zoom closer and airports without an IATA code later still, so small airfields no longer bury the big ones. Where airports overlap, the pointer picks the largest.
The airport visibility setting has a new choice, Major: All · IATA · Major · Hide. It shows only the major airports, works with the airport filter, and share images follow it too. Airport sizes come from yearly passenger figures in Wikidata and airport types in OurAirports; the sources are listed in Info. Feedback is welcome on Bluesky: @orthodro.me.
27 September 2026
Share images and videos in more formats
Orthodrome’s share studio now makes it easier to prepare a Map for a feed, story or video. Choose a template, heading, theme, statistics and link, then preview the result before saving or sharing it. Trip shows the routes and totals, Year puts them on a world map, Network highlights busy airports, and Compare sets Paths side by side by flight time.
Frame a Trip image directly on the map. On a phone, ready-made Story and Post images open the share menu quickly; you can still edit them before sending. The image follows the Paths visible on the map and carries the orthodro.me mark.
Video offers Flyover, Recap and Race. The phone and desktop default is vertical 1080 × 1920. Desktop also has Landscape 4K at 3840 × 2160 for YouTube and other landscape uses. Every video ends with the orthodro.me card.
Download the finished MP4 on desktop, or use Save and Share on a phone. See the sharing guide for recipes, framing, safe zones and export controls.
21 September 2026
Compare, winds and time-based ranges
Compare is no longer unfinished. Open it from the dock or with C and every Leg of the Map sits on one distance axis, in rows by Path, Destination or Origin. Chains are drawn Leg by Leg with their running distance, total and detour percentage. The Aircraft column shows each Path’s family and cruise speed and lets you change it, and the Time column gives the estimate. Click a dot to pin a Leg, hover another to read the difference in distance, per cent and minutes. On desktop the divider between map and panel can be dragged, and the browser remembers the height.
Range circles can follow the winds. Switch Range winds in the map settings from Still air to Winds or Both. The radius you typed becomes a cruise time for the Path’s aircraft family, flown outwards along direct great-circle routes through mean winds: further downwind, less upwind. Wind period picks the annual mean or a single month. Both keeps the still-air circle as a reference, and while a wind mode is on the time estimates in the dock, Compare and the map popup are flown through the same winds. It is a climate comparison, not a forecast or a flight plan. Try January against still air from Helsinki.
Ranges can be flight times. HEL@4h30 draws the circle an aircraft of the Path’s family reaches in four and a half hours. Change the family and the circle follows; in a wind mode the same cruise time is flown in every direction. The value chip on a Range card now opens in place, so you can change the radius or time without losing the centre.
There is also a new highlighted map: New York to Paris, a century of Atlantic crossings. Seven eras of the same route, each as its own Path with the aircraft of its day, so Compare reads as a timeline from the Spirit of St. Louis through Concorde to the A350. Feedback is welcome on Bluesky: @orthodro.me.
15 September 2026
Welcome to Orthodrome
Orthodrome is public from today. It draws great-circle Legs between airports in your browser, and it is still in development: expect rough edges and changes. Compare legs in particular is unfinished and still being worked on.
Draw legs takes expressions such as HEL-JFK, HEL-(JFK,LAX) or a range circle HEL@200nm, and you can click airports on the map instead. Legs are grouped into Paths, each with its own colour and line style. Copy link turns the whole Map into a readable address that carries every Path, name, colour and radius, so a Map travels as a link: there are no accounts and nothing is stored on a server.
The quickest way in is Highlighted maps, hand-made Maps that open as ordinary links you can keep editing — for example Lapland Christmas flights, December 2025.
Feedback, bug reports and suggestions are welcome on Bluesky: @orthodro.me.