one length counted off a calendar, one distance worked from geometry, and no price at all
What the flight box knows, and what it estimates
Thirteen places at three lengths make thirty nine figures on this site, from $2,065 to $12,421 a person, and not one of them holds a flight. The box below prices what they leave out, and this page separates the part of its answer that is counted from the part that is guessed.
Reserve your weeksA reply is written within one business day, by a person.
Why a flight box belongs beside a matrix
Every figure here starts on the day you arrive somewhere and stops on the day you leave. Reaching the place is outside all thirty nine of them, and this office arranges none of it.
A reader holding a length and a place therefore still has an unknown, and it is usually the largest single line in the whole budget. The box exists for that, and everything below is a plain account of what it can and cannot say.
Counted, estimated, absent
- Counted
- The number of nights between your two dates. A subtraction on a calendar, with nothing in it to get wrong.
- Counted
- The airports, the class of seat and the number of seats, exactly as you set them, unchanged all the way to the far end.
- Estimated
- The distance and the hours in the air, from two stored positions at a flat speed.
- Absent entirely
- Any fare, any routing, any airline, any question of whether a seat exists. None of it arrives on this page.
The first line is the reason the box sits here rather than anywhere else. Seven nights, twenty one and fifty six are the only three lengths this office sells, so the moment two dates exist the box can say which of the three they come to, or which two they fall between.
That is arithmetic against the site's own three numbers, not an opinion about your plans.
Arriving at the distance figure
- Where each airport sits
- A stored position travels with every entry, good to about five kilometers
- The speed assumed
- Five hundred miles an hour, flat, the same for every aircraft and route
- What gets added on
- Forty minutes, a flat allowance for getting up, coming down and crossing the apron
- What plays no part
- Wind, the true routing, connections, which aircraft it is, and every hour spent on the ground beforehand
Fly nonstop and the number lands close. Take a connection and it will not, and nothing on this page can tell which of the two an airline is about to offer you. It is an order of size, and the sentence beside the fields says as much.
Where the question actually lands
Not with this office. Pressing the button sends it to a booking company, a separate firm met through a host answering to a name this domain lends it. Quoting, reserving, taking payment and issuing the ticket happen over there, under a rulebook this office had no hand in. Buy something and part of a margin set long before your visit comes back here from their side.
The characters that cross
Baton Rouge to Lisbon, arriving on the third of October, leaving again on the twenty fourth, economy, two seats:
BTR0310LIS2410200
- Characters one to three
- Where the flight starts
- Characters four to seven
- Arrival, the day ahead of the month
- Characters eight to ten
- Where it finishes
- Characters eleven to fourteen
- Leaving again, ordered the same way
- Then one, or nothing
- The class of seat: blank for economy, otherwise
w,corf - Last three
- Adults holding seats, then children of two to eleven, then infants on a lap
Seventeen in that example, economy costing no letter. Eighteen is the ceiling and thirteen the floor for a single leg. Nothing about a person fits inside a string shaped that way.
The two forms here, and where each goes
- Where the flight box points
- Outward, at the booking company, by GET
- What rides in it
- A single parameter, with no person named anywhere inside
- Where the request form points
- Inward, at this site alone, by POST
- What rides in that
- Everything you write, your name included, and it goes no further than this office
⚠️ Every build checks that split. Two other sites in this family shipped their request form addressed to the booking company's host, so the build here refuses to finish unless every posting form is addressed to this site alone.
What stays on the machine in front of you
- Your name
- The box was built without a field for it
- Somewhere to answer you
- Also absent
- A card
- No field on this site can accept those digits
- The length and the mileage
- Computed on your own machine, transmitted to nobody
- The airport list
- A single fetch when you start typing, and silence on the network after that
The seven refusals
Until the script has loaded the button stays inert and looks it. Hand the far end something it cannot parse and an empty page comes back, which is less use to a reader than a plain no.
An airport spelled out but never lifted from the offered list. One airport standing at both ends. A date already behind us. A leaving date earlier than the arrival, which the second field settles by clearing itself the moment the first passes it. Ten or more holding seats. An infant on a lap with no adult seated beside them. Anything more than eleven months ahead.
Eleven months, and the reason for it
Each date in that string is given four characters: two for the day, two for the month, and none at all for the year.
Stay inside a year and there is no doubt, one October being all that is available to mean. Go beyond and the string gets finished for you rather than read wrongly: put in a date fifteen months away and the near October is what goes, prices come back against that instead, and the exchange is announced on no part of the screen. Four characters carry one meaning up to eleven months and no further.