revert(flights): remove the route feature, keep the tracking

[simplifaisoul]

Naming the two ends of a flight never worked well enough to be worth showing on screen. This removes the feature. Aircraft tracking is untouched.

Why

The data is not there to support it.

Ground truth for this is obtainable: a trace that ends in a run of ground reports means the aircraft landed, and the airport under its last airborne fix is where. Measured that way, across ~100 completed flights:

approach	coverage	correct
what shipped — race three sources, first reply wins	97%	30%
adsbdb alone	—	31%
hexdb alone	—	26%

The sources also contradict each other on 14 of every 16 flights they both answer, so "first reply wins" was a coin flip between two bad guesses.

Worse, they barely cover the traffic. Of 30 aircraft sampled straight from the live feed, 29 had no route entry in any database — cargo, charter, regional and business callsigns (FFL, CXK, EJA, GXA, JSX, PWA). The databases only know mainline airlines.

Three rounds of salvage attempts each moved the numbers without making the result trustworthy: corroborating a schedule against the departure the aircraft was seen to make (12% coverage at 36% correct), then against its course (54% at 62%), then widening the airport table from 370 to ~5,000 fields so more airports could be named at all (departure identification 14% → 62%, but destination accuracy fell back to ~45% as denser candidates produced more near-misses). None of it reached the bar for putting an airport name in front of someone as fact.

What is removed

• /api/flight-route and its three upstream sources
• The FROM/TO readout in the aircraft popup
• The airport dots and the dashed remaining-leg layer on the map
• departure/arrival derivation in /api/aircraft, and nearestAirport
• The endpoint reconciliation in the watch panel

What stays

Tracking, in full — aircraft on the map, the watch cards with model, registration and operator, and the flown track drawn from the aircraft's own reported positions.

Verified on localhost: three watch cards rendering AIRBUS A-321 / N156UW, AIRBUS A220-300 / C-GUAC, BOEING 787-8 Dreamliner / N809AA with their track point counts and no route row. Map layers checked directly — aircraft-track-casing and aircraft-track-line present, watched-airport-* and aircraft-pending-line gone. /api/aircraft still returns identity and 700-point tracks; /api/flight-route now 404s.

137 tests pass, next build clean, zero residual references to the removed symbols.

Two things for the maintainer

1. Local master carries an unpushed merge commit with someone else's Lithuania CCTV work (feat(cctv): add Lithuania — 304 Via Lietuva national-road cameras #265). It nearly rode along in this diff — this branch is based on origin/master to exclude it, but that commit is still sitting on local master.
2. core.autocrlf=true fights this repo. Several files are stored with CRLF, so a normal commit rewrites them end to end — it made a 36-line change to page.tsx render as 3,264. This was committed with core.autocrlf=false to preserve the original endings. A .gitattributes, or core.autocrlf=false for this repo, would stop the noise recurring.

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
osiris	Ready	Preview	Aug 9, 2026 8:56pm