Air Express

Inspiration:

In the current travel landscape, a persistent challenge travelers face is the ambiguity surrounding optimal arrival times at airports. Whether it's when to leave for your flight or when to pick someone else up, the lack of accurate and real-time information on influential factors, such as security checks, traffic, and flight delays hinders travelers from making informed decisions. Consequently, individuals often waste hours, experience unnecessary stress, and even miss flights due to inadequate information about the airport and road’s operational dynamics.

What we do:

Air Express is specifically tailored to airport travel, using APIs to accurately predict the entire journey from leaving the couch to boarding the plane. Air Express provides users with personalized recommendations for when to leave for the airport based on individual flight details, historical data, and user preferences.

What we used:

We mainly used JavaScript and React.js. We got access to an external API from SFO Airport that gives us Security Checkpoint wait times and we used the INRIX Routing API to optimize the drive to the Airport.

Challenges we ran into:

We had some difficulties learning React.js - this was our first time using that frontend framework and needed quite some time picking up the syntax. One of our largest challenges was routing and connecting the two repositories that we used for our front end and back end. This was another new concept that required either a server or local hosting, both of which were complex topics to learn in a day. We also struggled with using the routing INRIX API, as we were limited by airports not being in the bounds given by the API and by Frankfurt not having a dataset we could use in our code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are especially proud of going from not knowing what an API was or what it does to implementing two APIs in our code, both INRIX-supplied and from the web.

What we learned:

We learned how to use the frontend framework React.js, practicing using JavaScript and CSS and using the languages in tandem. The React framework allowed us to condense logic with UI in a simpler way as opposed to having two languages (HTML and JS) that depend and interact with each other. Backend learned all the steps that are involved in implementing an API into our website. Looking over our discord conversations, we learned about how to get an authentication token, avoid CORS errors, use Postman, and proxy and query our APIs. The backend also learned JavaScript logic at a deeper level - for one, with fetch and app.get, we discovered how to make a fetch request to our URL get a response, and store that data to create calculations. We also learned how to fully work with a team - we had hourly group check-ins (that we all stood up during to get the blood flowing) where we addressed what we intended to do, what we accomplished, and what we had planned as our next steps.

What's next for Air Express:

We aspire to add many more features in the future. Ultimately, this would mean having multiple databases that are dynamic and not constrictive. Our vision looks like this: we want users to get checkpoint data based on their specific flight number so we can calculate the time needed to walk to the flight checkpoint. In the future, we would want a way for users to have a more accurate time by including more factors, from the method of transportation to parking lot congestion time. We would want to provide users with a time range instead of just the longest time it could take to get to their gates. Currently, we have a starting location written down as coordinates that are hard-coded into our website. The reason for this is the two repositories not being able to communicate with each other and the front end not being able to fetch the starting location to provide it to the backend, we would like to change that so we can have the two communicate with each other. We would like to implement the Google Maps API to show the user their trip, it would establish credibility and allow users to visualize their journey. Also, be able to use the Google Calendar API for users to create events for when to leave. Lastly, change small things to our UI.

Built With

• api
• javascript
• postman
• react
• vscode