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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, ra
by FearNotDaniel 8y ago
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 :-)
- kenneth 8y agoAs 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.