Skyward Companion

What it does

Skyward Companion is a dual-mode travel assistant built for both passengers and flight crew.

Skyward Companion helps travelers navigate airport connections with less stress by:

Pulling flight details from a flight number (with seeded fallback when live data is unavailable)
Showing connection confidence (High/Medium/Low) based on time and transfer estimates
Recommending food and lounges based on the traveler’s terminal path
Providing baggage status tracking
Offering ride and airport essentials suggestions
Displaying a 3D globe flight visualization for a modern, intuitive dashboard experience

Skyward Companion helps flight attendants reduce fatigue and manage jet lag by:

We built Skyward Companion as a modern web application optimized for UI quality, speed, and reliability.

Frontend: React, TypeScript, Vite
UI: TailwindCSS + shadcn/ui (including dark mode support)
Routing: React Router
Data fetching and caching: TanStack React Query
Flight visualization: 3D globe route animation (react-globe.gl)
Flight data layer: flight lookup service with caching and seeded fallback support
AI-powered features: GPT-assisted generation for airport-specific recommendations and travel guidance when structured data is unavailable

The primary design goal was to make the experience feel airline-grade: clean, readable, and easy to navigate under time pressure.

Flight data reliability: Many flight status APIs require credit cards, rate-limits, or restricted access. To keep the app fully demo-ready, we built a fallback system using seeded flight data so the experience still works end-to-end.
Time zone correctness: Displaying accurate departure and destination local time required careful handling of time zone conversion and formatting.
UI stability with embedded 3D visualization: Maintaining responsive layout and consistent sizing while rendering a 3D globe required iteration and performance tuning.
Runtime crashes from missing data: Components needed defensive handling to prevent undefined values from breaking the user experience.
Deployment configuration: Shipping a Vite app to production required correcting build and start configuration so the app runs reliably outside local development.

Built a dual-user product experience (passenger and crew) with distinct, meaningful workflows
Delivered a high-quality dark mode UI across multiple pages
Implemented a complete connection planning flow with confidence scoring and route guidance
Developed a 3D globe flight visualization to enhance clarity and user engagement
Made the app resilient by supporting realistic demo fallback behavior without breaking the experience

Real travel applications depend heavily on data availability, so product reliability requires robust fallback architecture.
Time zones are deceptively complex and are essential to get correct in any travel tool.
A strong hackathon project is not only about feature count, but also about polish, clarity, and demo stability.
Good UI is not decoration; it is part of usability and directly affects whether a tool feels trustworthy in a high-stress travel context.