THE PUZZLE

Guess the flight from what it is broadcasting

Guess the flight is a compact description of a fairly deep puzzle. You are given an aircraft that is airborne, everything it is broadcasting except the one thing you want, and a map. Work out where it is going. Pin it. Find out how close you were.

Where the information actually is

A flight leaks its destination in four places, and none of them state it outright. The airframe sets the maximum range. The altitude places it in the departure, cruise or arrival phase. The ground speed separates aircraft classes and hints at the wind. The heading, projected forward along a great circle rather than a straight line on the flat map, sweeps out a corridor.

Intersect those four and you usually land on two or three candidates. Picking between them is where the game lives.

The traps worth knowing

A heading is a snapshot, not a route. Aircraft dogleg around weather, follow oceanic tracks and get vectored on approach, so the direction at the moment you see it can be twenty degrees off the direction it has averaged.

Great circles look wrong on a flat map. A flight from Chicago to Frankfurt appears to head far north of Frankfurt for most of its journey, which is correct and looks like a mistake.

Cruise altitude does not mean the middle of the flight. Short hops level off briefly and start down almost immediately.

What a correct guess is worth

The exact airport pays 5,000 points. Distance-based scoring pays the rest of the curve, so an educated near miss banks real points and a blind pin banks a few. Guess quickly and a time bonus is added on top.

Rounds feed a logbook, a level, a lounge tier and thirty badges, plus a leaderboard that ranks on accumulated points rather than best single round.

Guessing well is a habit, not a talent

The players who consistently land inside a hundred kilometres are not recognising tail numbers. They are applying the same four checks in the same order, every round, and refusing to be talked out of the airframe by a convincing heading.

The habit that separates them fastest is hub bias. Scheduled traffic concentrates into a small number of airports per region, so when the geometry leaves two candidates on the table, the busier one wins far more often than a coin flip. Applied a few hundred times, that single rule is worth more than any individual clue on the boarding pass.