A view of the Thousands Islands from the Jakarta-Singapore route. (Photo courtesy of Erik Wakker)
Traveling by plane from one city or country to another is a common method for people to discover the world in a fast and relatively hassle-free way. In fact, it has become so common that most passengers don’t think twice anymore about gazing out of the window to take a look at the world beneath them.
A website called Hidden Journeys aims to change this.
“The Hidden Journeys website was launched in November 2010 to create free, interactive, online guides to certain flight paths that allow passengers to learn about and engage with the parts of the Earth they fly over,” explained Hidden Journeys project assistant Susanna James.
“We realized that underneath any given flight path there is a fascinating journey across many different landscapes, but the passenger has very little awareness or information about where or what they are flying over,” she added.
“This leaves some passengers alienated from the parts of the world they can see from their plane window and is a lost opportunity for others to learn more about the world.”
The Hidden Journeys project was initiated by the Royal Geographical Society, a center for geographers and geographical learning founded in 1830 and dedicated to the development and promotion of knowledge.
“The society’s work is important in supporting and promoting geographical research, education, fieldwork and expeditions, as well as geography in society,” James explained.
“Using geography to foster a greater understanding of the changing world in which we all live in, and for which we are collectively responsible, is at the heart of the Society’s work.
“The Hidden Journeys project fits into the Society’s public engagement activity of promoting the importance of geography and why it is essential in helping us to understand our world, its people, places and environments in a new and unique way relating to air travel.”
The result is a unique website aimed at attracting people who are about to fly, or have already flown on, one of the flight paths included on the site. Travelers with access to in-flight Internet can visit the guides on the website directly as they are flying, and general interest users can use Hidden Journeys to gain more knowledge about geography, traveling and photography.
“Each flight path is researched by the Hidden Journeys team, who then produce articles and illustrate them with images and audio slideshows,” James said.
“Many of these images and maps are chosen from the society’s collections, which has over 2 million items spanning 500 years of geography, travel and exploration and is an unparalleled resource for research.”
But, according to James, the guides are more than just a mere collection of images and articles plotted on a map.
“The society adds value to the flight path guides by interpreting this basic information and then presenting it in a way that tells the story of the flight path, presenting the images and the text in a way that mirrors how an airline passenger views the Earth from a plane window,” she said.
At the moment, the website contains 25 different flight guides, for flights ranging from short hops to long hauls. The latest addition to Hidden Journeys is the Singapore-Jakarta route.
“Around 70 flights a day cross between Singapore and Jakarta, which means that every year, millions of passengers fly this route,” James said when asked why this particular path was added to the website.
“We chose to cover it on Hidden Journeys not only because of the volume of passengers who travel this stretch but also for the fascinating physical and human geography that can be discovered along the way.”
She said that although the flight only covers 900 kilometers, the plane crosses thousands of islands that lie scattered along the east coast of Sumatra.
“Each type of island formation can be seen on this flight, from the volcanic Riau Islands to the continental islands of Bangka and Belitung and the coral islands of Kepulauan Seribu (the Thousand Islands),” James explained, saying that her favorite part of the flight was crossing over the Thousand Islands.
“This string of coral atolls, reefs and sandbars stretch for 75 kilometers north-south and look spectacular from above,” she said.
“Only a handful of the islands are inhabited, and most are vital habitats for many rare and endangered marine species such as the hawksbill and green turtles.”
Hidden Journeys also invites its users to participate in gathering information and photographs, adding to the research.
“We encourage all our users to contribute their own images of the places that we feature on the Hidden Journeys website,” James said.
Visitors to the website can either contribute their photographs through the “contribute” section, or they can submit their photos to the project’s Flickr page (flickr.com/groups/hiddenjourneys).
Until now, more than 1,300 images have been added to Flickr, while hundreds more have been contributed directly to the website.
“Hidden Journeys also has its own Twitter and Pinterest pages where we encourage people to share their views of the amazing landscapes that they fly over both during and after their flight,” James said.
The feedback for Hidden Journeys so far has been predominantly positive.
“I think it is really impressive. The information is concise and just the sort of things I want to know,” said user Matthew Walton.
Michael Palin, president of the Royal Geographical Society until 2012, said “Hidden Journeys is, literally, about seeing the world. And you’ll never want an aisle seat again.”
James said that Hidden Journeys is frequently adding more routes. The next to be added will be the crossing between the cities of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Kiev in Ukraine.
Hidden Journeys wants to expand even further.
“We are also looking to develop the technology to allow Hidden Journeys guides to be more easily accessed by passengers while actually in the air,” James explained.
“Currently we are collaborating with an in-flight entertainment company to integrate this type of geo-entertainment into the in-flight moving maps. We are also looking into the possibility of creating a Hidden Journeys smartphone app.”
Next Time You Fly, Look Down
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