the whole instruction, printed before you press
What the Flight Button Sends, and Who Receives It
This catalog prints the number nobody else prints: how much of an average day a trip has already spent on your behalf. The same rule is turned on the flight box itself. What leaves your browser is one short line, between thirteen and eighteen characters depending on the trip. It is printed underneath the fields before you touch the button, and this page reads it back character by character.
The number this office prints, turned on itself
Seventeen trips sit in this catalog and every one of them carries an hour count: how much of an average day is spoken for before you have decided anything. No other desk prints that, and the reason for printing it is simple. A number you can look at settles an argument that a paragraph only continues.
The flight box gets the same treatment. It could have hidden its workings behind a button and asked to be trusted. Instead it prints them.
Read it yourself, before you press
Fill in two airports and a departure date, and a line appears under the fields. That line is the entire message. There is nothing beside it, behind it or after it.
Say it reads `DSM1509LIS2409c200`. Broken up:
- `DSM`
- Where you start
- `1509`
- Out on the fifteenth of September
- `LIS`
- Where you land
- `2409`
- Back on the twenty fourth
- `c`
- The cabin. Blank is the main cabin, `w` extra legroom, `c` business, `f` first
- `2`
- Adults in seats
- `0`
- Children between two and eleven
- `0`
- Infants held on a lap
Eighteen characters in that example, thirteen for a one way seat in the main cabin. Change a field and the line changes under your eye. If what it says is not what you meant, you can see that before anything is sent rather than after a page of results comes back wrong.
Whose systems answer
Not this office's, and every line of this points the same way.
- Fetching the price
- A separate firm, out of its own systems, at the second you ask
- Keeping the seat for you
- That firm
- Handling the money
- That firm, on its own pages. Nothing in this catalog owns a field capable of taking a card
- Writing the conditions on your ticket
- That firm. Those govern, and this page does not
- Changing the reservation later
- Not something this office can do, and it will not claim it can
- Where this office earns
- A share of a margin that firm had already built in, and only where a sale happens
- The effect on your figure
- None whatever. It was fixed before anybody knew where you came from
What never leaves this machine
Airport codes arrive as one file, once, at the start. Everything after that happens on your own machine: the matching, the ordering, and the assembling of that eighteen character line.
- Your name
- Never asked for in the box, so never in the line
- An address to answer to
- Never asked for
- A telephone number
- Never asked for
- Anything written into the request form elsewhere on this site
- Stays with that form. Two separate errands sharing a website
- The first thing that leaves your browser
- The press of the button. Every keystroke before it is silent
A half typed city you thought better of is seen by nothing and nobody.
What the box turns down
Before the script arrives the button is out of use, because there is no way to build a readable line without it and a live button would hand over an unreadable one.
Seven things it will not send, and it says so against the field responsible rather than in a heap under the button. A city typed but never lifted from the list, since only a genuine code may travel. One airport named at both ends. A departure already behind us. A return dated before its own departure, and that field clears itself if the departure is pushed past it. Ten or more in the seats, nine being what a single line carries. An infant on a lap with no adult seated beside it. And anything more than eleven months out, for the reason below.
Why eleven months and not twelve
Look again at `1509` and `2409`. Day and month, four digits, and no year in either of them. That is what the receiving end expects.
Ask for something sixteen months ahead and four digits have nowhere to record which September was meant. The far end takes the nearer one, answers a question you never put, and mentions none of it. Eleven months is simply where those four digits stop meaning one thing, so eleven months is where the box stops.
What this page is not
It is not a fare. The figures printed against flights on the trip pages are ranges this desk has watched those routes ask for, written down so a whole week can be budgeted at once; they bind nobody and they are not what you will be charged. The only number worth acting on is the live one that comes back on their page.
Nor is the box a way into a trip that has an operator behind it. Where a departure waits on a minimum number of people, or carries a date after which it is on or off, the box is the wrong instrument and this office is the right one.