Happy Late February, fellow fliers! Or is it flyers? My dictionary says both spellings are acceptable. As it happens, I recently got around to normalizing which spelling that BumpySkies uses, but I can't remember which one I went with, now. Let me go check. Aha, had it right the first time.

And the fact that there is in fact an "I" in "fliers" reminds me of one of my favorite changes that the website has seen since I started actively working on it again last fall. But before I get into that, a couple of tidbits about subtler improvements to BumpySkies, my free turbulence-forecasting website.

Less regional confusion

One issue that BumpySkies has had since its launch is an insistence that you name the actual operator of your flight, and not the larger airline who might have sold you your ticket. For example, if you have a seat on a certain United flight which is actually on a smaller regional jet flown by Republic Airways, then BumpySkies has historically given you a forecast only if you specify Republic as your airline. Otherwise, it shows you the "That flight isn't in my database" error page.

While this is technically correct, it's also confusing and frustrating. This behavior has been the number-one source of user-reported issues over the past month (after I improved the previous number-one issue of late flight forecasts).

So, I have just this week snuck in a fix: starting now, if you search for a flight that BumpySkies doesn't see on its horizon, it checks for any relevant regional airlines that have upcoming flights using the same flight number. If it spots one, then it shows you that forecast, instead.

If you get a chance to try out this new behavior for yourself, I'd love to hear your thoughts about it! As with all new BumpySkies features, I expect this one'll need some time to find the shape it wants. Nothing helps this happen faster than direct user feedback. Keep making use of that "Report an Issue" button as needed—or just reply to this email.

A fix for wandering waypoints

This next fix is a little more obscure, but it's tied to a fun story. In the list of January site improvements from last month's newsletter, I forgot to mention that I replaced the website's internal database of American airport and navigational-waypoint coordinates with fresh data provided by the FAA.

The BumpySkies navigational database hadn't seen an update since its launch nearly ten years ago, which led to flight paths looking a little strange from time to time. For instance, one waypoint that used to be in New Jersey seems to have had its name reassigned to a location on the west coast. As a result, BumpySkies would occasionally think that flights running from Seattle to Los Angeles would enjoy a quick diversion over the Great Lakes.

The fun part is how my use of FAA data here finally replaces the navigational data source I found many years ago, one which helped pull the first draft of BumpySkies together: a text file that I found inside the free demo of a flight simulator video game. Like a lot of "temporary fixes" that we mean to go back to and improve later, this one stuck around for a long, long time. Hey, the coordinates were all accurate! Gamers care about this stuff! But, as with any game system from 2016, it was in sore need of an upgrade.

Happily, I've gotten a little better about locating more official resources since then.

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Nelly and I

After all this talk of subtle changes, I've been putting off mention of the most obvious improvement to BumpySkies.com since January: the introduction of Nelly the nervous-flier groundhog, a new mascot for this project, as seen at the top of this newsletter and in various spots around the website. Nelly comes to us through the wonderful cartooning talents of Flynn Nichols.

I directed Flynn to draw the character as if she's genuinely excited to travel, while wrestling with a deep-seated terror of flying—but absolutely determined to see it through anyway. Flynn nailed it on the first try, giving Nelly a toothy and twitchy-eyed expression that unmistakably contains all the mixed emotions I feel every time I roll up the jet bridge, myself. Maybe you see something of yourself in her, too.

Insofar as Nelly acts as a personal avatar of my own attitude towards flying, her arrival to BumpySkies serves as a capstone to a larger set of attitudinal changes I've made to the website recently. For years, BumpySkies was run by an anonymous "we", or "BumpySkies team", but that was never quite true; it's only ever been me, working solo within a supportive community. Similarly, the site was always a little coy about its reason for existence, or intended audience. No more: right on the front page, above Nelly's nervous smile, it now reads "created by a nervous flier for other nervous fliers, making turbulence a little less surprising and scary". And I put my name on the bottom of every page, too.

When I first launched the site in 2016, I did so from the mindset of a software professional who was used to making my work sound a little bigger than it was, and favoring a "clean" and clinical presentation over a warm or personal one. Today I recognize BumpySkies as a personal expression, an act of caring, for myself and for others who are like me in a very specific way.

One last Nelly fact: My original name for the character was "Edie R.", which would have been a pun on the acronym for Eddy Dissipation Rate—the NOAA-provided measure of atmospheric turbulence that BumpySkies bases its forecasts on. But as soon as I saw Flynn's first draft of the character marching bravely towards the gates, her true name came to me instantly. I'm so pleased to meet nervous, courageous Nelly, and hope to be working with her for a long time to come.

Your fellow flier-with-an-I,
jmac