For our final project, we used a dataset of flights from 2015, to create an interactive application where the user could keep track of their flight's status. The user can subscribe to a flight to keep track of if it was cancelled or not, or they can use a table of delayed flights to search for their flights delayed status. The most up to date work and info can be found in the Final Demo folder.
For our project we plan to use the 2015 Flight Delays and Cancellations dataset. The data stores all of the flight information from flights in 2015, the information is from the department of transportation, and we want to provide users searching up flights with up to date flight statuses. On our application, users can search up flights by flight number or by a any combination of: departure airport, destination airport, estimated departure time, and airline. After searching the user will get one of four new screens. If the flight is on time, the user will be displayed a screen stating that their flight is on time and a list of flight attributes; these attributes include the departure airport, arrival airport, departure time, airline, and flight number. If the flight is delayed, the user will get a message similar to: "The flight (flight number), from X-airport to Y-airport, has been DELAYED, the flight will now be at (new time),which was originally at (original time). If the flight is cancelled, the user will get a message stating that the flight was cancelled, and they will see a table of flights with similar airports, and times that they can rebook onto. The last result would be if we can't find their flight, which shouldn't happen because our search bars should only let them search for flights that exist. We also plan to allow users to subscribe for email notifications for flights that they select. Our application will also display statistics for airlines , such as: percentage of flights on time,
Our application is useful because it gives users up-to-date information on their flights. Going to the aiport can be an extremely stressful situation, our application aims to ease that travel stress. By giving users notifications on the status of their flights and even helping them find alternative flights if theirs gets cancelled. There are similar websites out there, but ours is more aimed at the passenger of a flight, while most flight tracking websites are aimed at people who like to watch flights. The main difference is that ours sends notifications of the estimated time of departure, and provides help upon cancellations. A similar website is Flight Aware, which does not provide as many search options as we do, and their main focus is the flight path so people can see where the flight is at from take-off, to arrival.
In the future, ways this application can improve are in the data category. Using up to date information instead of older data, so that way the application is much more useful to users, as they can actually track their flights in real time. Another thing that could be improved upon is implementing the e-mail notifications after implementing the up to date data. E-mail notifications allow the user to be less vigilant when using the application, as they do not have to constantly check to see if their flight is on-time, delayed, or canceled. In addition, currently, our application focuses on the user side. In the future, we plan to add an admin side, allowing administrators to manage flight data directly through the front-end interface, rather than relying on MySQL Workbench.