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Your New Way to Get Through a Long Flight: The Flyover Country App

Thursday March 31, 2016

Raise your hand if you also insist on the window seat, and then spend a lot of time staring out at all the little houses below, the miniature pinpoint cars making their way to work. Noticing baseball diamonds and backyard pools, or the bright blue-lit grid of a shopping center.

But then there’s a small town cluster of cabins in the middle of a mountain chain, or a lone ice-covered pond glaring the sun’s reflection and you wonder, “where the heck is this??”

Well, it turns out there’s a new app that will tell you exactly what you’re looking at: Flyover Country.

Available for free on iO6 and Android, Flyover Country is an offline app (obviously), built by the University of Minnesota, that lets you choose 2 points in the US, and then loads your flight path. You then have the choice to save it offline. Your flight plan appears as a wide yellow band stretching across states, with points of interest highlighted by round circles. It’s no exaggeration that, zooming in, you’ll find thousands of points of interest along your flightpath. The dots will tell you about bodies of water and the expeditions that discovered them, fossil finds, geologic rock formations, with links to offline Wikipedia if you’d like to learn even more about it.

As I sit, I’m exploring a region just outside Laramie, Wyoming close to Allen L. Cook Spring Creek Preserve, where the fossils of a brontosaurus excelsus were found. The plutonic rock there is 1600 million years old, and this preserve is considered to hold the “richest cache of undisturbed dinosaur fossils in North America” per Wikipedia. Well then!

This is kind of the coolest thing.

 

One Response to “Your New Way to Get Through a Long Flight: The Flyover Country App”

  1. Thanks so much for the post! We hope you enjoy the app!

       

    4/10/2016 at 9:17 am