Happy summer, fellow fliers.

My kind of town

Today I write to you from Chicago, just a couple of hours by air from my home in New York. The LGA-to-ORD path is a key artery of people-moving over the northern United States every morning, and a layer of typically energetic rainclouds suspended over Lake Michigan wasn't about to slow down traffic last Wednesday. All of which is to say that, as a nervous flier, I didn't much care for our plane's joyous and unavoidable dance with the Windy City's namesake weather as we banked and dove down towards O'Hare.

Cartoonist, zine maker, and my fellow New Yorker Shannon Spence coincidentally shared a comic strip on Patreon about her fear of flying right before my trip. The comic reveals how, like me, Shannon developed her aerophobia as a young adult after a childhood that reveled in frequent air travel. (She attributes it to binge-watching morbid YouTube videos about air disasters; I have no idea where my own fear came from.) And also like me, she's found ways to live with her fear, acknowledging it while not letting it stop her from traveling.

As a subscriber to BumpySkies News, you know the direction my own coping strategy took, and I did indeed use BumpySkies last week to at least anticipate my flight's roller-coaster approach to ORD. My scary-but-safe flight, Shannon's comic, and the almost-daily emails I receive from Buttondown about new subscribers all encourage me to put a new issue of this newsletter together, even if mainly to greet everyone who has arrived in the three months since the last issue. (Hello!)

Though the website hasn't seen any significant new features since the vernal equinox, I can still discuss several improvements, and publish this newsletter's very first call for new-feature beta testers.

Airlines keep surprising me

I never stop learning about obscure decisions that airlines make which show up as BumpySkies bugs. Here are a few recent examples:

• Airlines sometimes assign the same number to different flights leaving the same city. There are airlines who will happily assign a certain flight number for a Boston-to-Miami flight on one day, then re-apply the number to Boston-to-Dallas the next day... and then reset it back to Miami the day after that. BumpySkies didn't handle this well, resulting in reports from users wondering why their flight forecasts had the correct times and origin airports and utterly incorrect destinations. This is fixed now.

• Hawaiian Airlines and Alaska Airlines merged last year. This fact wasn't relevant before last March's big BumpySkies update, which introduced support for flights outside the contiguous US. Some users couldn't find their Hawaiian flights in the system. Since the two airlines merged last fall, all Hawaiian flights are technically Alaska flights—just retaining the Hawaiian brand name. I had no idea! Anyway, this is now fixed: if you search for an upcoming Hawaiian Airlines flight, BumpySkies shows you its forecast under its Alaska-coded callsign.

• Very rarely, code-shares go two levels deep. BumpySkies normally handles code shares smoothy: if you search for a Delta flight that's actually served by a regional airline like Sky West, for example, BumpySkies shows you the correct Sky West forecast. However, I spent a whole afternoon last month diagnosing a report from a BumpySkies user who couldn't find their flight from Salt Lake City to Oklahoma City; they only saw forecasts for the return trip in the other direction. This happened because the flight out was a Sky West flight sold as a different Sky West flight, with its own flight number, which in turn was sold as a Delta flight.

  I'll be honest: I haven't fixed this one yet. It's so weird! I don't think that this kind of multi-layered code-share issue affects very many flights, but the fact that I got even one report about it means that it's worth fixing just the same, sooner or later. It remains on my to-do list.

Beyond the above, I've made a great deal of very small improvements, tweaks, and fixes to BumpySkies since March, almost all of which are based on user reports. Thanks to all who click that "Report an issue" button whenever anything doesn't look quite right with the site—every report helps me make BumpySkies work better for everyone else!

This is a free newsletter, by the way

You've read half of this issue of BumpySkies News! Perhaps you'd like to subscribe for free?

A call for testers

I have one major feature waiting in the wings: text or email notifications when the turbulence forecast for your upcoming flight is ready to view. In fact, this feature is live on the website right now, but only available to certain users. And, at the moment, the list of "certain users" is not longer than myself. This is the most complicated new BumpySkies feature since I initially launched the website a decade ago, and I would like a few more people to beta-test it before I declare it ready for general release.

So: if you plan to use BumpySkies to forecast an upcoming flight's turbulence within the next two weeks—let's say before July 15 or so—and you'd like to help test this feature, drop me a line at jmac@bumpyskies.com, noting which day your next flight is. If there's room in the tester-pool, I'll set you up with an account to try out some notifications for yourself.

I am especially interested in hearing from folks who use BumpySkies monthly or more!

Have a calm summer

That's all for now. I hope that the next newsletter will offer more than a mere tease about major new BumpySkies features. Until then, may your summer travels be pleasant, and your flights swift and calm.

jmac