Ask HN: My side project. Is it useful?

Quick criticism. Please take it as points to improve:

The UI is too complicated and confusing. I can't get my head around it. Can you simplify it?

Zooming in and out of the map with the mouse wheel doesn't work.

Too many error messages. Instead of saying "you didn't pick any destination", ask me to pick one from a list or predictive textbox.

Don't show me destinations to which there are no routes. Spending five minutes clicking around to get an error message in the end is no fun.

Don't separate the to and from locations so much visually. Tabs don't feel right for that kind of thing. Anyway, it's just two fields, just show them together.

You didn't completely carry through the concept of going from place to place, rather than airport to airport. When I search for Paris as my destination, you show me a dot on Paris the city, and couple of dots for the airports. My instinct is to click on the dot for the city, not the airports. Let me select the dot for the city.

You could make this really intuitive by getting rid of the text boxes entirely. Let me just click on the map to do everything. Click to select both start and end locations.

Nice tool, good design, UX could be improved, but I like the idea.

   There's not a flight search engine that I know of that
   would group those airports together.

Not really, I always use the map feature on SkyScanner, you can see and choose a nearby airport, and you can also check if a direct flight is available. If there's one thing where your tool is different, is that you can type the name of a random place, but I find hard to believe that people would be so clueless about the place they're going to.

   And two of those airlines (Easyjet, Ryanair) do not show
   up on flight search websites

Again, SkyScanner does that, and so does a number of other flight search engines or travel sites such as Expedia, eDreams, lastminute etc. This is simply untrue.

Overall, good job, I don't see why people wouldn't want to use this.

p.s: Should you land in Verona Villafranca, come say hi! I live near there :)

I'm an Irishman who lives in New Zealand, but I'm currently visiting the inlaws in Italy. Just flew in to Venezia (Marco Polo) this morning, and have spent some time in Bassano del Grappa in the past. It's a fantastic place and a great Mecca for paragliders. A friend used to run a restaurant there called l'Antica Abbazia several years ago, and it was frequented by all the fliers. Ah, the memories are flooding back now! Hope you managed to catch some of those fantastic thermals while you were there.

Oh, and all this OT rambling just to say well done on your side project. As others have pointed out, it's not entirely unique but it's useful and a good start.

It determined that I was in Ireland, presented a list of irish airports and will only let me choose them as source and destination. What if i want to fly to or from another country, which in such a small country is far more likely?

You've just helped me simplify the itinerary for my upcoming vacation in December! Thanks!