Most flight search engines show you a list. You scroll through rows of text — departure time, arrival time, price — trying to mentally reconstruct what your travel day actually looks like. How long is that layover? Does this flight eat your whole morning or just the afternoon? Is that 4-hour gap at O'Hare long enough to question every decision that led you here?
The timeline view answers these questions by making you do zero math. Every flight is plotted on a 24-hour horizontal axis. The colored bar starts at your departure time and ends at your arrival. Layovers show as gaps. You can see at a glance which flights leave you with a usable morning and which ones are trying to ruin your life.
The Hipmunk Inheritance
Hipmunk had this right in 2010 and then went and died in 2020, leaving the entire internet to sort flights by price like animals. We picked up the torch. Same concept — flights as horizontal bars on a time axis — but with our chevron strip system layered on top. Each segment is colored by the time of day it occupies: amber for morning, teal for afternoon, charcoal for the red-eye you're going to regret.
The Animation
Switching between list and timeline is animated because we believe in small joys. The flight bars slide from full-width to their time positions with a staggered cascade — top flight moves first, each subsequent flight follows 30 milliseconds later. It looks like a wave. Switch back and they slide home. It serves no functional purpose. It sparks joy. We kept it.
Overnight Flights
Flights that cross midnight are clipped at the right edge with a gradient fade and a +1 badge. Because if your flight lands tomorrow, you deserve to know that upfront — not buried in size-9 text that says 'arrives +1 day' like an apology.
