Virtual WA Airport Tour

wa route 2717

I occasionally dabble with flight simulators. Since I own X-Plane 11 with the OrbX TrueEarth Washington scenery, I thought it’d be fun to visit every airport in the state. I started with this list from Wikipedia, which I manually annotated with longitude/latitude from skyvector.

Then I spent some time figuring out how to even start plotting a route. At first I was led astray by the mlrose python library. Running simulated annealing for hours gave me a route that was 4242 miles in total, and you could just look at it to see it wasn’t very good. The LKH software works much better. In just a few seconds it computes a route that is 3402 miles. There are still some obvious problems with that route, which I fixed by hand. This gave me the route in the picture, which is 2717 miles. I’m sure much better routes exist, but this is good enough for me.

About the author

Living the good life in Seattle, occasionally sharing something interesting with the Internet.