yonder transponder

Inspiration

Most people waste their flight experience by sitting on their phones/screens while missing out on breathtaking beauty below their feet. Looking at places we live and love from 40,000 ft is a surreal experience that people miss out on. yonder transponder solves this

What it does

Our program captures the Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast signal from the airplane that you are flying on, and extracts its coordinates and heading, all without GPS (cuz GPS doesn't work up there on phones). We then calculate a simulated field of view and construct a polygon of coordinates that one may be able to see. Within those coordinates, if there happens to be a place of interest (like a city, a national park, or a mountain peak), then the user gets notified while our program runs in the background throughout the flight. It also comes with educational information generated by Gemini, with a focus on geological and wildlife information on natural reliefs, and cultural and historical information on cities.

How we built it

We built a React app that serves the ADS-B data, makes the polygon calculations client-side, and checks a dataset of places of interest within that polygon. For the polygon itself, we refer to the heading (direction) that the aircraft is flying, then create an arc with 45* offset in the direction of flight to look outside a passenger's blind spot, and carve out a 90* arc with a radius of 200km, up to 135* from the direction of flight. We determined the radius of our sector with this formula, d = sqrt(h(2R + h)), where R=6370 km is the radius of the Earth, and h~8km for a low floor altitude. The polygon is drawn at the intersection of the aircraft's location, the top of the arc, the bisector of the arc, and the bottom of the arc. Once we have determined a place of interest, we feed it to Gemini and output educational facts about it.

Challenges we ran into

Working with ADS-B data was our first challenge. Figuring out the math behind calculating the field of view was also challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the educational and entrepreneurial impact that this project will have. It will turn the mundane activity of flying into something passengers will look forward to. It will also keep children engaged throughout the flight while giving them the opportunity to learn something new about the places they overfly.

What we learned

We learnt the importance of Math and Computer Science with this project.

What's next for yonder transponder

yonder transponder's target audience is airlines. Many airlines already have multi-functional apps - Lufthansa has games built into theirs to entertain children, United and Swiss have a flight simulator in theirs. By indoctrinating our project into an airline's app, it boosts its NPS score and subsequently improves customer retention.