Choosing Flight-by-Flight: Graphical version
This section describes how to interpret some of the graphical elements used in the graphical version of the "Choose flights" interface; if you haven't already, you may well want to read through the general description of the "Choose flights" interface, as well as the tutorial, before reading the sections below.
Overview
Below is a brief tour of some of the elements of the graphical version:
Anatomy of a Flight Bar
The colored bars below the matrix in the figure above are called flight bars. Each flight bar is a colored (possibly multi-colored) bar which represents one of the flight options for the trip you are building. Each flight bar contains one or more legs on one or more airlines; for flight bars with more than one leg (and thus with a connection), the connection layover is represented in gray, and if the gray area is wide enough for text, the three-letter code of the connection airport will be written on it. Here's an example:
Setting the Resolution of the Timeline
If you want to increase the resulution of the timeline, you may click on the "View" links just below and to the left of the matrix display to make things larger on your screen. One advantage to this is that the gray layover areas in the flight bars, which may have been too small to display the names of the connection airports in them, become larger, and often permit the display of the three-letter airport codes for layovers.Timeline Legends
The flight bars are always displayed over a timeline of some sort, so that you can tell the duration, departure times and arrival times of flights, as well as layover durations and times, all at a glance. Depending on the nature of your trip, and the results that were returned, we use three different kinds of timeline legends in an attempt to make timezone changes more understandable and legible.Flights within a single timezone
If the flight origin and destination are always in the same timezone, there are no real timezone issues to worry about. In this case, there's only one time frame of reference, and things are pretty simple:
Flights which span multiple timezones
If the flight's origin is in a different timezone than the flight's destination, things get a little more complicated. In this case, we actually display two timelines; one for the origin timezone (on top, in blue, and one for the destination timezone (on bottom, in red). Because people are usually interested in the local time, wherever they are, this is useful; one can refer to the local time in the origin timezone when considering departure times, and refer to the destination timezone when considering arrival times.
Flights which depart across a wide time range
Finally, in cases where flights depart across a wide range of times, the resolution of the timeline becomes so small as to be unusable (flight bars all become tiny and hard to compare, etc). In these cases, we create a timeline which does not span an absolute period in time (for example, Tuesday, July 3 through Thursday, July 5), but rather a time range which is relative to the departure and arrival times of day of the flights involved:
So, for example, in the timeline above, we know that the first and second flight bars depart at the same time of day, but the departures could be on different days; one has to look at the details of each flight bar to know its date of departure.