one line that is measured, one that is only calculated, and one that is a link
What the lookup adds to the board, and what it merely guesses
The board carries twenty-six dated departures and no flights at all. A box that prices flights therefore sits outside everything else here, and the least it owes a reader is a plain account of which parts of its answer are known and which are worked out.
Why a flight box sits on a departure board at all
Every price on this board is per person for the ground and begins the moment you are down. Not one of them contains a seat on an aircraft, and this office arranges none.
That leaves a reader holding a dated departure and no idea what reaching it costs, which is an unhelpful place to leave somebody. So the box exists, and the whole of its honesty is in admitting which company answers it.
The three lines it produces
::lines Measured | The month your outbound date falls in. A date has a month; there is nothing to get wrong. // Calculated | The distance and the time in the air, worked from two stored positions at a flat speed. Close on a nonstop, wrong on a routing through a hub, and it says so. // Not produced at all | The fare, the routing, the airline, the availability. None of that ever reaches this page.
What the month line does, and what it deliberately does not
Pick an outbound date and the box names the month and links that month's page on the board.
It stops there on purpose. It does not tell you how many departures stand in that month, though the number is written on every month page. Those counts live inside sentences, and pulling a number out of a sentence to state it as fact is exactly the shortcut that nearly put a trip on the wrong continent elsewhere in this estate. A link is safe. A scraped figure is not.
How the distance is calculated
::lines The two positions | Carried with every airport in the list, good to about five kilometers // The speed | A flat 500 miles an hour // The allowance | Forty minutes for climb, approach and taxi // Not in it | Wind, routing, connections, the aircraft, and the hours you spend on the ground first
On a direct service the figure lands close. Put a change of planes in the middle and it does not, and nothing here can foresee which of the two an airline will offer you.
Whose desk the question reaches
Not this one. The button hands it to a booking company, a separate firm met over a subdomain this board lends it. That firm quotes, that firm reserves, that firm is paid and that firm writes the ticket, all of it on its own pages and under its own rulebook. If you go on to buy, a share of a margin it set long beforehand returns to this office from its side of the line.
Eighteen characters, counted off
Kansas City to Reykjavik, out on the ninth of June, back on the eighteenth, economy, two seats:
MKC0906KEF1806200
::lines Three letters | The airport it leaves // Four figures | The outbound, day then month // Three letters | The airport it reaches // Four figures | The return, in the same order // One letter, or none | The seat: nothing for economy, w premium economy, c business, f first // Three figures | Adults in seats, then two to eleven year olds, then infants held on a lap
That comes to seventeen, economy costing no letter at all. The ceiling is eighteen and a one way question falls to thirteen. Room for a person is simply not part of the design.
The other form on this page, and where it goes
There are two forms on the home page and they behave in opposite directions, which is worth stating plainly because it went wrong here once.
::lines The flight box | A GET to the booking company. Carries one parameter and no person. // The request form | A POST to this site and nowhere else. Carries your name, your address and whatever you write, and none of it leaves this office.
⚠️ The request form shipped pointing at the booking company's host. It was caught before this board went live and corrected, and a check now fails the build if any form here posts anywhere but this site.
What stays with you
::lines Your name | No such field is built into the flight box // A reply address | Also absent // A card | Nothing on this site could accept those digits // The mileage it works out | Computed on your machine and transmitted to nobody // The airport list | One fetch as you begin typing, then the network sits idle until the button
The seven answers that are simply no
Until the script has loaded the button stays inert, and it wears that inertness openly. Hand the far end something unparseable and back comes an empty screen, of less use to anybody than an outright no.
A city spelled in full but never lifted off the offered list. One airport standing at both ends. A departure day that has already gone by. A homeward date sitting earlier than the outbound one, which the second field resolves on its own by emptying as soon as the first overtakes it. Ten or more occupying seats. A held infant with no seated adult booked alongside. Anything dated further out than eleven months.
The eleven month edge
Each date in that string gets four figures: a day, a month, and no year whatever.
Inside twelve months only one June can be meant. Beyond it the string is completed on your behalf rather than misread: put a date fifteen months away into it and the closer June is what gets used, live figures return against that, and the swap is never announced. Eleven months is the last point where four figures carry one meaning.