one figure read off a calendar, one worked from geometry, and nothing at all about a price
What the fare box measures, and what it only estimates
Twenty seven trips stand on the ladder from $1,951 to $6,545 a person, and not one of those figures contains a flight. The box below prices the part they leave out, and this page sets out which of its two lines is measured and which is only estimated.
Send a booking requestThe Pine Gazette answers every request within one business day.
Why the flight sits below the ladder
Five rungs describe how much of a trip is run for you, from being met at the airport down to holding only a permit and a boat. Not one rung includes a flight. Nobody in this office books one, no figure on this site contains one, and that is true at the top of the ladder as much as the bottom.
Which leaves a reader holding a trip and no idea what reaching it costs. The box exists for that, and everything below is an account of what it can honestly say.
Its two lines, and they are not equally reliable
- Read, not guessed
- The nights between your two dates. A calendar subtraction, and there is nothing in it to get wrong.
- Read, not guessed
- The airport codes, the cabin and the seat count, exactly as you set them.
- Estimated
- The distance and the time in the air. Two stored positions, a flat speed, a fixed allowance for climb and approach.
- Never produced
- A fare, a routing, an airline, an availability. None of that reaches this page at any point.
The first line is why the box is worth the space. Set two dates and it tells you how many nights you are away, then says how that measures against the trips this office actually runs: the shortest is seven nights, the longest fourteen, and it counts how many of the twenty seven would fit inside your window.
That is a fact about the catalogue, not an opinion about your plans, and it is read off each trip's own stated length at build time rather than pulled out of a sentence.
How the distance is worked
- Where each airport sits
- A latitude and longitude ride with every entry, accurate to five kilometers or so
- What speed is assumed
- Five hundred miles an hour, flat, with no variation by aircraft or route
- What is added on
- Forty minutes, standing in for the climb, the approach and the taxi at both ends
- What is ignored entirely
- Prevailing wind, the actual routing, any connection, the equipment, and the hours you spend in a terminal before any of it
Book a nonstop and reality lands near the number. Accept a connection and it will not, and this page cannot tell which of the two an airline will put in front of you. What is offered is a rough order of size, said in those words beside the fields rather than dressed up as something firmer.
Whose desk receives it
Not this one, at any point. What you press sends the question to a booking company, which is a different business entirely, met through a host answering to a name borrowed from this domain. Producing the figure, reserving the seat, accepting payment and issuing the ticket all happen over there, governed by a rulebook this office had no part in writing. Buy something and part of a margin priced well before you arrived comes back here out of their side of the transaction.
Counting off the eighteen characters
New Orleans to Reykjavik, out on the sixth of May, home on the sixteenth, economy, two seats:
MSY0605KEF1605200
- Slots one to three
- Where the flight begins
- Slots four to seven
- The day of departure, then its month
- Slots eight to ten
- Where it ends
- Slots eleven to fourteen
- The day of return, written the same way round
- Slot fifteen, or nothing at all
- The seat: blank means economy, otherwise
w,corf - Slots sixteen to eighteen
- Adults holding seats, then children of two to eleven, then infants carried on a lap
Seventeen there, economy costing no letter. Eighteen at the longest and thirteen for one leg. There is nowhere in a string of that shape to put a person.
The two forms on this site, and where each one goes
- The fare box, method
- A GET, to the booking company
- The fare box, contents
- One parameter, and nobody's name inside it
- The request form, method
- A POST, to this site and nowhere else
- The request form, contents
- Your name, your address and whatever you write, none of which leaves this office
⚠️ Every build tests that split. Two other sites in this family went out with their request form aimed at the booking company's host, so the build here now refuses to finish unless every posting form on the site is addressed to this site alone.
What stays on your machine
- Your name
- The box has no field for one
- A reply address
- None
- A card
- Nothing on this site could take those digits
- The night count and the distance
- Worked out in front of you and sent nowhere
- The airport list
- One download as you start typing, and the network is quiet after it
Seven answers that are no
Before the script arrives the button is inert and looks it. Give the far end a string it cannot read and a blank page comes back, which serves a reader worse than a refusal.
A city typed in full but never taken from the offered list. One airport at both ends. A departure that has already gone. A homeward date before the outbound one, which the second field settles by clearing itself as the first passes it. Ten or more in seats. A held infant with no adult seated beside them. Anything dated past eleven months.
Eleven months, and what draws the line
Every calendar slot in it holds four figures and no more: two for the day, two for the month, and not one for the year.
Within a year that is unambiguous, since only one May is available to mean. Reach further and the string stops being read and starts being guessed at on your behalf: name a date fifteen months ahead and the near May is what gets sent, real prices arrive for a week you never asked about, and no line on the screen admits the swap. Four figures hold one meaning up to eleven months and no further.