Exciting New Travel ‘App’ To Help Cruising Passengers Explore The Earth Beneath Them

An exciting new travel app will now allow air passengers to explore unique and interesting places down below while on the way to their destination. Fliers will not just be able to determine precisely where they are at cruising altitude, but also find themselves aptly acquainted with the unique and interesting spots they’re flying past.

The app will provide an edifying experience for passengers using flights that navigate between land routes on relatively cloudless days. They will also have access to visual, as well as statistical, information on each and every point of interest located along their flightpath.

The new app, known as Flyover Country, is an offline mobile app introduced for “geoscience outreach” and data discovery. It provides passengers with interactive geologic maps, localities, informative content, base maps, navigation, altitude, speed, and heading. It displays all of this information without the need for passengers to activate in-flight Wi-Fi. On their respective devices, users will see features tagged on a map that correspond to different locations on the ground.

Amy Myrbo, a geologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and one of the co-developers of the app, says the best use of the app will be during clear flight routes offering prime visibility. However, according to her, on cloudy days as well as during night flights, the app will provide absorbing weather and sky-related material for passengers to get engrossed in it.

“I hope that people will get an idea of the connectedness of geology and weather and humans and see the scales of things. There are these huge expanses of open spaces, but you can also see massive, massive evidence of human effects on the landscape, whether it’s dams backing up rivers, mines, deforestation or agriculture. There are these incredible natural features, but there is also a huge, ever-increasing human overprint to all of this.”

On a pristine blue-sky day, an airplane window provides for some mesmerizing sights. Most fliers are typically unfamiliar with the oft-appearing magnificently stretched out wilderness or the beautiful iridescent mountain ranges emerging into light beneath them. Some of these passengers may be invariably lured towards the splendor of these surroundings from up above. Shane Loeffler, the person who introduced the app to the world is one such traveler.

“I was looking down from an aero-plane window and seeing this huge landscape, these geological features, and wondering about the landscape I was flying over,”

A 2014 report had revealed there were 37.4 million flights scheduled during the year, with an average of 102,465 flights per day. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization UNWTO, international tourism touched 1,184 million in 2015 with nearly 50 million more tourists flying to foreign destinations around the world as compared to the previous year. These figures are indicative of the fact that more and more people are now traveling around the world and by extension, spending more time in the air. As well, the influx of new technology in air travel in recent times has been unprecedented.

Many have grown accustomed to international travel and the increasingly trendy and appealing recreational pastimes associated with it. The unique merits of a highly insightful, in-flight “guided sightseeing” experience for passengers while cruising over 35000 feet above the earth can be seen as a remarkably exhilarating experience from a traveler’s perspective.

According to the app’s developers, that Flyover Country app’s usefulness is not restricted to air travel alone. It can also be accessed during road trips, hiking excursions, and numerous other types of outdoor pursuits that may necessitate use of the information it has been designed to provide. The app is now reportedly available for purchase in the app store.

[Image via Shutterstock]