Find out more about the world below your flight path with Flyover Country

It sounds much like any other mapping app: enter a starting point and destination, see the route and points of interest along the way. Flyover Country won’t give you driving directions, local hotels or someone’s random picture of a lake, though. It’s a geoscience app from the University of Minnesota, and these points of interest are more about geologic maps, data, fossil information, georeferenced Wikipedia articles and more.

Setup is easy enough. Tap two or more points on the map to define your route, select "Load Path", and watch as Flyover Country finds data associated with that journey.

There’s an option to save most of this information (not Wikipedia articles, sadly) for offline use, handy if your in-flight Wi-Fiis poor, or you’re on a road trip and have no internet connection at all.

Flyover Country isn’t restricted to static maps. It can use GPS to display the area around your current position, orient the map to your direction, and adapt the view to your situation ("plane" displays a wide strip to cover everything you can see from your window, "car/ foot" is narrower but more detailed).

This relies on you having a good GPS signal, of course. The developer warns that "GPS functionality is only possible from the window seat and reception quality varies by device/conditions".

Still, the offline map will be available, whatever the GPS situation, and overall Flyover Country is an interesting and educational way to explore your travel route.

Flyover Country is a free app for Android and iOS.