My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar

> ”A Learjet at 40,000 feet shows up the same as an AirBus that just took off at London City Airport, however it’s a lot easier to spot the jumbo jet in the real sky.”

When I use FlightRadar24, I actually see different icons for jumbo jets vs Learjets vs prop planes - so they do not show up the same for me.

Maybe the author means altitude is not distinguished per this quote:

> ”I added some simple log scaling to the map annotations using the altitude of the flight so higher up aircraft appear larger on-screen.”

After downloading the app, planes high in the sky overlap/hide planes lower to the ground. I wonder if color coding the planes would have been better than using different size planes to indicate altitude.

Eg brown/green planes mean close to the ground, and blue planes mean high in the sky. Then have all planes the same size, and use different plane icon shapes for distinguishing commercial jet vs private jet vs prop

I _still_ remember all that travel too. It was different enough to make a lasting impression.

99% of our life is spent in the same 2 sqkm area, so it’s not super surprising that everything else is different.

The first time we traveled internationally with our kids (a 5-year-old and nearly-2-year-old twins), my wife and I assumed the kids wouldn't really care, but we'd go anyway because we didn't want to give up international travel for a few decades just because we have kids.

They absolutely loved it. Now the 5-year-old is 15, they've been joined by a couple more siblings, and (Covid-execepted) we've gone on at least one international trip every year.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite books is in "A River Runs Through It" when the narrator says, "When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it."

I recently went through a decade of photos to see if I could unearth memories of the "more perfect" moments in my life. Nearly all of them were on those trips with my kids.

There's something uniquely "us against the world" about international travel as a family. Not that we approach the world antagonistically, but just in that traveling across borders, and making our way through airports, and figuring out unfamiliar mass transit systems, and navigating unfamiliar cities in languages we don't speak requires a level of coöperation we're not usually called upon to exhibit as a family.

I'm sure there are times it's brought out the worst in us, but they're far, far outweighed by the times it brings out the very best parts of being a family.

You can also see a bunch of other places on a map that line up with runways: South Boston (including Castle Island), East Boston, and a bit further from Logan is the harborwalk around Long Wharf and the aquarium. (The aquarium might also be interesting to kids. There's some free viewing windows for a little of it, while walking past, to maybe gauge interest before paying admission. And there's various tourist things in that area, including various harbor boat rides.)

A camera/cameraphone with >1x lens will get them a closer look at planes. Or binoculars/monocular if you want to reduce screen time, or to encourage appreciating it in the moment rather than trying to capture it. (What kind of hearing protection works for kids?)