Christmas comes early at Transience Divine! But without music.

If you’re like me, you want to get away during the winter. You don’t really care when, as long as it’s before too long, and you don’t care where, as long as it’s far from here. And you want a great price for that place. I’ve spent hours trying random locations and dates, but no longer!

This weekend I made the Community Flight Finder! Give it a range of dates (by default, it’s the next 5 months), a range of length of stay (say, 5 – 10 days), a list of origin airports (only airport codes– the current default consists of DC’s, NYC’s, Boston’s, and Philly’s), and let it go. It will query Or-bitz again-and-again for days, with random queries to any of 2000 airports around the world, and rate them by the metric “cents-per-mile”.

Even better, we can all help each other! Everything goes to a central database, which you query and contribute to.

The current best results include $208 r/t to LA, $370 r/t to Peru, $535 r/t to Honolulu, $714 r/t to Shanghai, $773 r/t to India, $913 r/t to Indonesia, and $938 r/t to Australia (all taxes should be included).

This is a beta version! I want your comments on what to add and improve. Future work will include a prettier UI with a map of the results, a way to limit the destinations you want, more sites that it can check, community “interest” ratings and comments, and way to deal with old results. I’m also going to release the code under GPL in about a week.

Download it and fly! ffly.zip.

[Edit 2009-11-03: I’ve updated the archive, with a necessary file for accessing the database, several UI improvements, and more stability.]