I feed ADSB data I collect with an antenna sticking out the attic window to FlightAware and a handful of others. Not sure why I do that, maybe the attic is an escape from my ol' lady, but I'm glad to learn it's going toward a good cause!
Speaking of grounding the 737 MAX, I should probably ground that antenna...
Well, have the airlines owned up to what needs to be canceled? I'm flying in a week on a 737 something, I would hate for it to get canceled the day before, but if I saw it was scheduled for such an aircraft in the past, I could actively reschedule it myself.
In the future, the 737 MAX will only permitted to resume passenger flights once the safety issue on the plane has been fixed.
The 737 MAX is still likely to become one of the most common planes in the world for many years to come, as it's predecessors in the 737 line have been. If you are planning to permanently refuse to fly on the 737 MAX because of this incident, you may wish to be aware of the safety records of... well, every other plane:
But the reality is, particularly once these issues are addressed, the 737 MAX 8 is arguably the safer aircraft. While I recognize that people will base their actions on recent media rather than logic, we as the tech community shouldn't be helping them make bad decisions.
Nice. This is certainly handier than trying to catch a glimpse of the tail number before boarding and then navigate the FAA's registry website on my phone. I suspect many people don't even know the significance of that big number starting with N on the tails of most aircraft. However, I'd wager that most people boarding a plane know their flight number and the name of their carrier.
Even the assumption that it's a letter followed by numbers is US-centric... for most European countries at least, the tail 'number' is actually all letters; and there are many countries whose identifying prefixes contain a number.
That'd be awesome. BTW, some flight tracking services do show detailed information about the airplane, like service time (age), etc... I might give it a try
If you know the flight number and name of airline and aircraft make -- do you also get the Aircraft (ID?) -- such that you can see ALL the routes . this plane has flown over the last N period and know how many flight hours and miles it has under its belt for some period?
You could then calc the downtime that the planes get for maint/cleaning/etc...
I think they meant "flight number including two-letter prefix". But even those get reused from week to week (even day to day?) so might be different models.
When talking of short flight numbers, Speedbird 9 is what jumped to mind ... at least for me.
> Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
British Airways Flight 9, from London Heathrow to Auckland, 24 June 1982.
It's good to know that you pick up different aircraft types for the same flight on different days in the recent past or the near future. For certain flights, they might usually be on an Airbus A-320, but sometimes they might be on a Boeing 737-800 or 737-900.
However, I'd like to see the option of choosing a date or date range, if that was possible. I might want to go back further than just one or two weeks, for example.
They might also change with very short notice, I would think? In case of a delayed inbound flight, or mechanical problems with the scheduled aircraft that require substituting a different plane.
Short notice type changes are rare - as well as needing different pilots, the seating layout is different (requiring a re-issue of all boarding passes), and cargo restrictions and capacity is different so all the cargo would need reassigning.
Virgin Australia is not on the list, i assume they dont make that info available?
I dont really know flight numbers off the top of my head[1], it might be helpful to add a top 10 searches or pick of the day type feature. Some way to see something without knowing specific information.
[1] i can't be bothered to google flight numbers, but i will spend 10x the time writing this comment.
This is kind of cool but there are other good tools for it, as commenters mentioned. (Seatguru, FlightAware.) I think the missing feature there is simplicity and “so what?” Tell me why my a321neo is so cool, how to tell it apart from other planes when I see it on the tarmac, when it was designed, how many are out there, which airlines operate lots of them. Others will beat you on feature richness, but I just want an app I can use to teach my kids about planes, and geek out on them myself.
You could use it to figure out which seats are emergency row seats. Some flight check-in pages don't display the emergency exits when choosing your seats, and it can make the difference between being able to use your 17" laptop or not. :P
Hi Eddie - well done putting this together, it works really smoothly. I'm going to assume this is a fun project just for learning or to show off your skills, rather than something you're hoping to grow up to serious scale or even monetize. The reason I say that is, speaking as a frequent flyer, this is not something I would categorize under the YC mantra of 'build something people need'. True, the choice of aircraft is important to me, but Google Flights tells me that information when I'm searching for tickets, before I've even booked. It's true, as someone else noted below, that sometimes the same airline/flight number on different days will be flown with different equipment. And speaking as someone with a strong preference for Airbus over Boeing that matters when an airline like Cathay Pacific (one of the airlines you're missing, btw) will fly a B777 one day and an A350 on another day between Hong Kong and Melbourne (for example). If it's a holiday, where the exact day doesn't matter, then yes I am one of those people who might pick a different date because I prefer that kind of aircraft.
But even if Google didn't tell me that immediately before booking, I wouldn't be able to get it from FlightAware data (via your site or otherwise) because airlines don't seem to post it there more than a few days in advance. And besides, since I'm a plane geek I tend to look stuff up directly on FlightAware or FlightRadar24 all the time (I live right under the final approach to a very busy airport so I often go there just to see where the planes over my head have come from!), so I'm not sure what value you're adding by giving a tiny subset of the data that is available there for free anyway.
But still, as I said, I think it's great work if this is just for learning or demo purposes, well done. If you wanted to provide a bit of a usability improvement, I would second one of the comments below that suggests you shouldn't need to ask for the name of the airline if people supply the full flight number, i.e. with the letter prefix. That's the format that people will have on their tickets/booking emails etc, and it's actually a tiny cognitive load to mentally convert "OS264" into "Austrian Airlines" dropdown followed by "264" without the prefix; the clever part, for you of course, would be to convert the airline prefixes as used in ticketing and airport displays (OS, LH etc) to those that are used in the routing data (OS->AUA, LH->DLH etc).
Now if you could make an app that tells me exactly where to find free water refills at any airport after going through security, then I'd be happy :-)
As a frequent flyer, I appreciate the tool because it's surprisingly hard to tell exactly which model is being flown. Google will tell you it's a 737, but not which variant of 737. Many airlines don't break it down either. And
I have ExpertFlyer for that, but that's a paid subscription. Or I could fiddle with FlightAware's crappy UI. But having a neat tool that tells me immediately is cool.
As for why I care? Different planes often have different seats and in business class it can make a world of difference. Fly United's 777-300ER with the Polaris seats, or 777-200 with the "coffin seats" and you'll get a sense for why knowing the `-300ER` suffix makes a huge difference.
Yes, other sites have been providing this, but I think this stands a chance of ranking well in the future when people search for what their aircraft is, and with good reason: it does that one thing without distraction. Especially on tiny phone screens, minimalism is a huge feature. Bonus points for reacting quickly to a media hype.
Roughly 300 737max. Roughly a year in operation. Roughly 100.000 airplane days. Two accidents. The 737max has a safety record that is equal to two accidents per day in global air traffic. Or 700 crashes per year. With roughly 150 seat filled roughly a 100000 dead per year. There is a reason she is grounded and people are concerned.
However that's a specific type of plane that may have crashed for unrelated but improbable reasons.
In geenral flying on a scheduled airline is immensely safe. A 777 is no safer or no less safe than an A340.
Unless you fly air france and they decide to divert to Damascus in the middle of a civil war and have a whip round to pay the fuel bill [0], in which case the solution is Don't Fly Air France.
I suppose flying a recently introduced plane is a bit like being operated on by a young and inexperienced surgeon. Someone's got to do it or else the plane will never get a billion hours of service history / the surgeon will never be 45 years old with 15 years plus of experience and steady hands and sharp eyes.
For comparison, the fatality rate for motor traffic in the US was 8.25 deaths per billion passenger-miles in 2016 ([0], [1], my calculation). There were 7.1 trillion passenger-km of global passenger air traffic flown in 2016 [2]. 100,000 deaths (your estimate) in 7.1 trillion passenger-km is equivalent to 22.6 deaths per billion passenger-miles (my calculation).
In other words, if all global passenger flights were on 737 max planes and the fatality rate continued, flying would be a little under 3x as deadly as driving on US roads on a per-passenger-mile basis, based on your estimate.
This is really cool! It'd be nice to be able to maintain a logbook of the different aircraft I've flown on, maybe grabbing the tail numbers of the planes as well if possible?
On top of that, some airlines like Qantas name their planes (e.g. you'll have an A330 named Cradle Mountain). I'm not sure that the mappings are publicly available but maybe it can be crowdsourced.
I'm not flying soon so I don't have a flight number to put in. I wish I could see your app! Maybe you could show a feed of random flights or the longest flights of the day or something like that that I can click on.
Just guess one! [Airline]1 is usually a flight. Is it usually the ‘flagship’ flight I wonder? I know Qantas is Sydney - London (and QF2 is the return).
reply