Frequent Flyer

Inspiration

When looking at the available tracks, we were most interested in the American Airlines track and specifically leaned toward tracking and utilizing flight data to improve service. This stemmed from one of our team member’s experience as a DFW airport contractor and a public database that tracked the wasteful expenditure of fuel by private aircraft. We believe that tracking flight data can be used to improve passenger experiences and airline logistics.

What it does

Frequent Flyer is a API interface that allows service providers to visually track their airline member’s flights on a map. By doing this, statistics like a members most frequented flights can be used to give loyalty rewards and tailor a passenger’s travel experience to suit their needs. Using the data set as a whole can track frequently visited airports and predict particularly busy air and passenger traffic. This information can be used to decrease delay times and reduce fuel costs.

How we built it

Development started with UI design and discussion over usable public databases and datasets. We ended up using a test data set from Kaggle and running our backend on MongoDB and hosting it on an Amazon web server. Using the UI design from before, we built the site on React with the Tailwind CSS library and added map UI from MapBox and then connected our dataset to location and user interfaces.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial idea was to track fuel waste from the use of private aircraft. Unfortunately, we could not find a public API that tracked privately owned planes and provided tail numbers, something we needed in conjunction with other APIs, without payment. We then pivoted towards commercial airlines and used a test dataset on Kaggle to specifically track AA flights to offer logistical insights instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We created a web application with MongoDB, AWS, and the popular Tailwind library. This was the first use case of these services for most of us. This was also the most amount of tracks we’ve been able to apply for so far at a hackathon. We are proud to have made a plan to learn new tools all while remaining in an achievable scope.

What we learned

Hackathons give us more relevant project experience than University classes generally do. We were able to use common libraries and development tools for the first time and successfully created a functional web application.

What's next for Frequent Flyer

Frequent Flyer is a promising data API that makes flight data more accessible and visible. Possible features may utilize predictive AI to automatically set flight paths based on learned traffic data. A previously mentioned loyalty system could be created out of this data API to improve customer experience as well as alert them to possible delays on high traffic days and poor conditions. With the accessible data API Frequent Flyer, the sky’s the limit!