First Class Economy

Improving the boarding process by incentivizing better boarding habits and fostering a personal experience.

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First Class Economy for Southwest Airlines

Flying economy doesn't have to feel like anything but first class.

Inspiration

Southwest's model of open seating sometimes means facing the unknown. Is that seat really open? Will I get a window seat? Seeing exactly which seats are open live allows passengers to know what area of the plane to head to when boarding. Incentivizing less desirable seats (middle and further back) allows boarding to proceed smoothly as passengers are encouraged to fill the plane back to front.

Features

Hardware sensors detect which seats are open and update a live view of seats for passengers to know which seats they want to go towards.

How we built it

  • HTML/CSS/JS
  • Arduino and Hardware prototyping
  • Adroid Studio
  • Bootstrap - Front-end library
  • jQuery - Javascript library

Authors

  • Charlie Henry - *API Integration and Mobile Development- charlie-henry
  • Justin Siu - Hardware Implementation & API Integration - jks5464
  • Mahir Karim - Mobile Android Development - mahirkarim
  • Allie Runas - Web Development - allierunas
  • Mihir Shah - Hardware Implementation & API Integration - CodiWanKenobi

Challenges we ran into

We had a tricky time getting our API to integrate with our front-end solutions. Help from our mentors got us back on the right track.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Polling API with live updates to seat occupancy
  • Clean and simple interface
  • Mobile web and Android solutions

What we learned

  • Hardware/software integration for IOT development
  • Web development
  • Android development
  • ThingSpeak Channel creation

What's next for First Class Economy

  • sleep

Acknowledgments

  • Thanks to all the volunteers who made HackTX 2018 great!
  • Charlie Albright for help with CSS issues
  • Dave Symons for helping us poll our API call
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