AAlign

Inspiration

A majority of our group is international students, who fly overseas to visit family in other countries. However, these flights are very long, often reaching well beyond 20 hours in duration. To make such an experience more bearable, many airlines break these long-distance flights up into separate flights, and have passengers wait at an airport somewhere between their origin and their destination. This wait is referred to as a layover. If these layovers are long enough, passengers can go to visit the city surrounding the airport. However, with the rise and continued global pandemic of COVID-19, airports have created a classification system to regulate the ability of passengers with a layover to explore the city surrounding the airport. We took inspiration from such a system to create an application to be used by American Airlines to help create a better travel planning experience for American Airlines passengers.

What it does

Our application is a HTML/JS web application that uses an API provided to us by American Airlines to simulate flight data to help us create the experience of planning a layover on long-distance flights. The application allows then passengers to review how COVID-19 regulations might affect their layover at specific airports. The final stage of our application then shows a list of flights fitting the criteria entered by the user, at which point the use of the application ends, to be picked up in future iterations of AAlign.

How we built it

To build our application we used languages like JavaScript and Python, and used tools like VS Code and Postman. We also used GitHub for source control on the application.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenge we encountered was trying to learn how to develop our application using Next.js and TypeScript. None of us had experience in those languages, and we got lost trying to teach ourselves the syntax and how to properly integrate the API into our front end. By the time we realized we were trying to build our front-end out of our API, we did not have enough time to resolve the issue. To that end, we decided to stick to what we know and create our front-end using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how we were able to add onto the data implemented by the API to fit our own purposes, as well as creating a functional product in such a short timeframe.

What we learned

We learned a lot of information about API construction and modification. Some team members learned how to use GitHub in a semi-professional environment, while others expanded their skills in source control.

What's next for AAlign

In future iterations of AAlign, we might implement an animated visualization of routes on a geospatial map, where passengers can see their flights in a much more realistic way, instead of entries on a data table. Implementation of this may be done Bing Map SDK and/or Unity.

Built With

• css3
• flight-engine
• html
• javascript