Live Plane Tracker

I briefly lived in D.C., and because most of downtown Washington is in the flightpath for Washington National Airport, a plane would pass over my apartment approximately every 2 minutes. After hearing the distant rumbles of planes for a few days, I started to wonder where those planes were headed to or coming from.

I frequently use FlightAware to track planes a family member is on, but they also have a (paid) API which allows you to, among other things, fetch a list of all planes within specified GPS coordinates.

I spent some time playing around with the API using Postman, and I discovered that the FlightAware data is ~20 seconds delayed from realtime (which is perfectly reasonable). I adjusted my GPS coordinates to bias them slightly closer to the airport and less directly overhead of me, and soon I was able to accurately id a plane as it passed overhead.

For this project, I wrote a small Express API which can query FlightAware, and then a React app which makes requests against my Express API.

The server code:

const app = express();

app.get("/api/checkForFlight", async (req, res) => {
    let flights = await checkForFlight();
    res.json(flights);
});

app.get("/api/getFlightInfo", async (req, res) => {
    if (req.query.ident) {
        let flight = await getFlightInfo(req.query.ident);
        res.json(flight);
    }

    res.status(204);
});

// All other GET requests not handled before will return the React app
app.get('*', (req, res) => {
    res.sendFile(path.resolve(__dirname, '../client/build', 'index.html'));
});
  
app.listen(PORT, () => {
    console.log(`Server listening on ${PORT}`);
});

I needed the separate backend because I couldn't expose my Flight Aware API keys, and at the time I had plans for publishing the app on the Internet. As it turned out, the app only ever ran on my local machine, so I probably could have skipped the separate backend.

Here is a video showing the app working in DC.

Unfortunately, the FlightAware API calls were prohibitively expensive, so I couldn't just leave the program running. It was more of a one-off party trick than anything else, but still pretty neat.