Flight Forecast

Ever wondered about the probability of your flight being canceled or delayed? Look no further as we have developed a website that can generate a rating of whether the flight will be delayed/canceled.

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Inspiration

Due to recent current events, it has been more important than ever to take into consideration the risk of a flight being delayed/canceled. This can be due to weather conditions, adjacent flights, and other possible factors.

What it does

We have developed a website that would allow us to input a flight number and a date of departure, and it will display a rating on the risk of the flight being delayed based on the factors considered above.

How we built it

We used a python script to gather flight data from the American Airlines Flight Engine Repository. The data collected from the repository is a flight number and this gets turned into the arrival and departure locations (EX: DFW JFK). The airport codes are then converted into coordinates by the google geocoding service (developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/overview). These coordinates are used by weather data from weather.gov and Open Weather Map to create a reliable risk ratio from 0 to 10 as well as explanations as to why that flight number has that rating. We ran a React front end with a Flask backend which runs on a server.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult learning the basics of web development, as well as learning how to create API calls for our specific algorithm. We realized that it would be better to use a Flask backend rather than Express because the algorithm used to create the rating was written in Python. We also had trouble with React components and communication between the components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our front-end design as well as the algorithm we created used to generate a rating.

What we learned

We learned about basic web development as well as API calls and routing.

What's next for Flight Forecast

A feature that could be implemented in the next iteration of Flight Risk Rater is a text-message-based service that would notify users of real-time changes to the flight rating as well as develop a comparison feature that could be used to compare numerous flights and their ratings.

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