Slide

Inspiration

Every time I leave a flight, I inevitably find myself waiting twenty or thirty minutes for my baggage to come out on the carousel fiddling with my phone, trapped in a room with no way to spend my time. For people who fly a lot, these minor nuisances that come with each flight can really add up. So, why not use existing technologies airlines already have and implement to make the customer's life better?

What it does

Slide provides a way for customers to keep track of their baggage in a valuable way: whenever their checked luggage reaches the carousel, send them a notification! We built this off a process that already occurs; before baggage reaches the carousel, it must be scanned and confirmed it's leaving the hands of the carrier airline. In this process, we obtain the email of the owner through a QR code attached to the bag tag, and verify it by cross referencing the email with emails of passengers on the American Airlines' flight currently exiting the carousel for a match. Upon email validation, it sends an email to the bag owner that their luggage is exiting

How I built it

We built our app using react native, with the AA Api provided to us. We made modifications to the source code found on the master branch to store user data with regards to where their baggage was going.
Our application first takes in data about the current airport and the flight the baggage handler/employee is currently handling for. Serverside validation via the AA API is done on both these inputs (both the flight numbers and times, and the Current location (to ensure it is an airport)). After input, the user is then allowed to access the flight information page, which lists out all the information about the flight. The camera is also then able to be used to scan in a user's baggage QR code, which will then give an email. This email is then validated on the serverside to ensure that it is both authorized on the flight (via reservations) and also an authorized passenger. An email is then sent to the user about the location of their baggage and advisory information about to handle any suspicious handling.

Challenges I ran into

React Native was a pain to set up on Android. I used a previous configuration to skip a lot of the setup steps, but I ended up changing a bunch of the core files to allow the app to be downloaded and run on my phone.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm proud of being able to create this application in under 4 hours. It was a pretty interesting cycle of finding customer issues, and attempting to solve them with existing technology. React Native was fun to mess with and it was nice to get a refresher on it.

What I learned

I learned a lot about Node and React Native in general. We were able to do most stuff client side, so I was able to do a lot of in depth speed optimizations with the time space tradeoff (caching).

What's next for Slide

For the immediate horizon of this, we would like to move from our demo app and integrate it better into the airport ecosystem: currently we use our own, separate app to scan the bag-tag QR code where information about the flight must be entered. However, since agents will already scan a bar-code to check out bags after a flight, and because flight information about bags is already entered when a carousel is activated, our idea could be integrated into airport technology for an incredibly seamless experience.