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Window seat

Your flight as a long strip of land to 3D print: the mountains, coasts and cities you flew over, the route raised along the middle and both airports on the ends. For a honeymoon, a first flight, a move abroad or a pilot's favourite route.

Your flight

Type an airport, a city or a code such as ZRH or LSZH. Not an airport? Search any place: a home town, a summit, a ship's port.

The band on the map is the land the strip shows. A dashed blue line is open sea that is squeezed short.

Or start from an example

The strip

How much land either side

The whole width of land shown, half on each side of the route.

Long sea crossings

A long ocean crossing becomes a short wavy gap with its name and distance on the front, so the land at each end gets the room.

Mountain height

Name the peaks and cities along the way

Size

Length of each piece Pieces

Keep each piece shorter than your print bed. More pieces make a longer strip; they join end to end with short pins of 1.75 mm filament.

Width of the land

Words

Title along the front Date Distances and heights

Engrave terraprinter.com underneath

The letters are cut in a Latin font: accents such as é, ñ, ø and ł are kept, but other scripts can't be engraved yet and are left out. Write those names in Latin letters.

Colours

The land's colours change with height, so on a one-nozzle printer they are simple colour changes at a layer. In the 3MF every colour is its own named part.

Download

Free for personal use, and for selling up to $5,000 a year with a TerraPrinter credit. Bigger sellers need a commercial license. Keep the data credits. License

How the strip is made

The real route

Planes fly close to the shortest path over the globe, the great circle, so that is the line the strip follows, over the pole or across the date line if that is the short way. With a stop, each leg is its own great circle and the strip turns smoothly at the stop.

Unrolled straight

The land either side of the route is laid out as if the flight were one straight line: the distance flown runs along the strip, the land to the left and right across it. Mountains are made taller than real so a long strip still shows its ridges.

Oceans, squeezed

Most long flights are mostly sea. Squeeze the ocean shortens each long open-water crossing to a small wavy gap with its name and distance, so the coasts and mountains at each end get the room. Only the land closes the gaps further; True length keeps the real proportions.

Ideas to try

The flight of a honeymoon or a first trip abroad, the route home for someone who moved away, a pilot's or cabin crew's favourite run, or a scenic hop: over the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes, or past Everest on the way to Lhasa.

Airports: OurAirports (public domain). Elevation: Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS (SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and others). Peak names: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Map © OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO. Flight times are estimates. Want the view from the ground? Make the view from a summit, a map of the places in a life, open the TerraPrinter app or see more 3D map gift ideas.