Five real flights. Two questions. One tap each.
Five rounds a day, one tap each. Every round shows a real flight on a label-free map and asks you one of two questions, named in the banner above the map. Tap where you think the answer is, drag the pin to adjust, then press Confirm. One guess per round, no second attempt.
Where does it land, and where is it now. On a landing round you see the aircraft mid-flight with its real path drawn back to the airport it left, and you are told that airport, the airline and the total flight time - only the destination is hidden. On an in-flight round you are given both airports and how long it has been flying, and the aircraft's position is hidden.
Three of one and two of the other, and it flips each day. So if today is three landing rounds and two in-flight, tomorrow is two and three. Neither type is ever the whole board, and the mix for the day is shown on the board itself.
Every round is worth up to 200 points, for a maximum of 1,000. Your distance from the answer is still shown, but the leaderboard ranks the normalized point total, highest first. Landing-round points halve every 600 kilometres; in-flight points halve every 300 kilometres because both airports are given.
Departure, airline and total flight time together give a range of possibilities rather than a single answer. Ryanair with 2h15m out of Dublin could be Paris, Milan, Munich, Barcelona or Vienna. Showing the distance as well would close that range into arithmetic, because the direction is already visible from the path.
Two reasons. A great circle, the genuinely shortest path across a sphere, is not a straight line on a flat map, and real flights also follow oceanic tracks and jet streams. That is why long routes between Europe and North America run far further north than the map suggests they should. The reveal shows you the straight-line reading and the truth side by side.
Because the names would be part of the answer. City and country labels would let you read the destination off the basemap instead of working it out, so the map shows terrain, water and roads only. The airports you are GIVEN are labelled - the departure airport on a landing round, both airports on an in-flight round.
No. Every flight is a real flight recorded at a real moment in the past. Nothing shown is live traffic.
Yes. Tab to the map, move the crosshair with the arrow keys, hold Shift for larger steps, zoom with plus and minus, reset the view with Home, and press Enter to place a pin and Enter again to confirm it. Every clue is available as text.
These labels describe how far your pin was from the answer. Points are calculated separately for each question type, with 200 available per round.