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Quiet Quarterly(585) 240-3176
A walking path forking in two on open moorland beside a plain standing stone, low sun

the flight box measured against the six obstacles this catalogue is built on

What the lookup sends, and what it cannot see

Everything in this catalogue is filed under the things that stop people going. A box that prices flights deserves to be measured the same way, so here it is against all six, including the four where it is no help whatever.

There is nothing to buy here, and this page names no fare at all.

The box against the six

Somebody will not fly, or not far
This is the one it answers. Choose two airports and it states the distance and roughly how long that is in the air, before any question of price.
The dates are fixed and there are not many of them
Half. It takes exact days and will refuse a pairing that cannot work, but it knows nothing about whether the trip around those days can be assembled.
The party does not move at one speed
Nothing. It counts seats. It has no idea who is in them.
Nobody has travelled like this before
Nothing.
The free weeks fall outside the season
Nothing. It cannot tell a good week from a bad one.
One person travelling, and the room is priced for two
Nothing. It has no concept of a room at all.

One answered, one half, four blank. That ratio is the honest description of what a flight box is worth on a site organised this way, and it is why the box sits below the catalogue rather than above it.

How the distance is worked out

Every airport in the list carries a position, stored to about five kilometers. When both ends are chosen the box measures the great circle between them and turns it into a rough time in the air.

What it uses
The two positions, a cruising speed of 500 miles an hour, and forty minutes added for climb, approach and taxi
What it does not use
Any airline timetable, any actual routing, any connection, any wind
What that means
A direct flight will land near the figure. A routing through a hub will not, and the box has no way of knowing which you will be sold

It is an estimate, offered as an order of magnitude, and the wording beside the box says so rather than implying a precision it does not have. It is worked from two positions and not from a timetable. Four hours is where it starts pointing at the trips filed under won't fly far, because past four hours that obstacle stops being theoretical for most parties.

Whose desk the question lands on

The button does not send anything to this office. It sends it to a booking company, a separate business working behind a host that answers to a name borrowed from this domain. That company quotes, holds the seat, takes the card on its own pages and issues the ticket under its own conditions. Where a booking follows, a share of a margin it had already set reaches this office, and nothing is added to your side to cover it.

What actually crosses to that company

One short string, read by position. Rochester to Dublin, out on the ninth of April, home on the eighteenth, economy, two travelers:

ROC0904DUB1804200

Three letters
The airport it leaves from
Four digits
The outbound, day first then month
Three letters
The airport it lands at
Four digits
The return, written the same way
One letter or none
The cabin: nothing for economy, w premium economy, c business class, f first class
Three digits
Seats for adults, then children of two to eleven, then infants who travel on a lap

Drop the return and it shortens to thirteen. There is no space in it for a name, and that is a property of its shape rather than a promise anybody is keeping.

What stays here

Who you are
Not asked for, and there is no field that could hold it
How to reach you
Not asked for
What you wrote in the request form on another page
Goes to this office alone and is unreadable to the box
A card
No field on this site anywhere would accept the digits
The distance the box worked out
Calculated where you are sitting and sent nowhere

The airport list is fetched once, the first time you type into a field. After that the box asks nothing of the network until the button is pressed.

The seven refusals, and where each one prints

The button will not work before its script has arrived, and it looks disabled rather than pretending to be ready. A string the far end cannot parse returns a blank page, which is less use to a reader than a plain refusal.

Seven refusals, printed next to the field that caused each. An airport spelled out but never lifted from the offered list. Both ends the same airport. A day that has gone. A return before the outbound, which the field settles by emptying itself the moment the outbound passes it. More than nine in seats. An infant on a lap with no adult seated to hold them. And any date beyond eleven months.

Eleven months, and the reason

The dates in that string are four digits each: a day, a month, and no year whatever.

Inside a year that reads one way only. Beyond it the string is not wrong so much as filled in on your behalf: ask about a date fourteen months out and the nearer April is taken, real figures come back for it, and nothing on the screen mentions that a year was picked without being asked. Eleven months is the last point at which four digits mean one thing.

Two jobs that are not its own

It will not quote for a trip. Every figure in this catalogue is a starting price per person for ground arrangements, and no seat on an aircraft is inside any of them.

And it will not tell you whether a trip works for your party. That is the whole subject of the other six pages, and it starts with saying what stops you.