I have a dream: Always Fly on Time
“Scratch your own itch” … this problem clearly falls into this category. I am living in Budapest and take frequent flights to Germany. easyJet is one of the carriers that happens to fly to the places I want to go to. While they have extremely competitive prices - yes, they are cheap - they have also some issues with scheduling their flights or whatever else but fore sure they are regularly a bit late with their departures.
It is hard to put exact numbers to this but I estimate that about 30% of their flights that I have used are late. The waiting times vary between 30 minutes to 2 hours (to be fair to them, the 2 hours were a one time only incident). Waiting for 30 minutes is quite ok you might say. True, it ain’t that much. Still, if I had the choice, I would rather not wait that extra 30, especially because I usually travel light, so I can afford to be at the airport pretty late.
Now the idea:
Track the expected delay of a plane and make this information easily accessible. (I don’t want to have to go to the website of the different airports or similar.)
I already found some websites that seem to be doing something similar, or at least provide data necessary for this:
- flightradar24.com shows live airplane traffic from different parts around the world on a Google Map
- data.flight24.com claims to be the largest online aviation database. One can search for airplanes, flights or airports. They belong to flighradar24.com.
- flightstats.com delivers real-time and historical flight information. They have an API as a premium service but that one is pretty expensive.
I don’t have time to search further right now but I already put this out there, so that maybe somebody can point me to further resources about flight data.
Just one more note: flightstats.com also has widgets for embedding in your website. I am using the departure widget for Budapest airport as an example. Pretty neat. (Select another Time Period if you see no flights)