Don't Delay

Visualizing time delays on airplane flights over time.

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Inspiration

When I was searching around for interesting ideas and data, I came across this dataset on airplane flight delays. That reminded me of the last time I took a flight and we were stuck waiting to enter the airport for an hour because they didn't have any free gates. That sucked.

What it does

Using past data, this Android app generates a graph showing how many minutes previous flight departures had been delayed due to one of the five defined causes - carrier / company service, inclement weather, NAS, security measures, or late arrivals of aircraft.

It also reports which of the five causes is the most prevalent reason for delay for this time period, as well as the proportion of delay it causes and the minutes delayed on average related to it.

At the time of submission, the app supported a short-term view of 250 flights and a long-term view of 500 flights.

How I built it

This project was built entirely in Java, using Android Studio on a laptop running Ubuntu. App was tested on my personal Android smartphone. Alongside the regular Android API, WilliamChart was used to create the graph visualizations.

Challenges I ran into

Connecting the data was a challenge - due to the nature of android app packages, including the downloaded dataset with the code caused several issues with compilation. I worked around this by directly opening an input stream from the source website within the code.

Due to the sheer size of the dataset, and the relative simplicity of WilliamChart compared to other tools more focused on big data visualization, only a small subset of the data was used in this project to avoid lag and timeouts.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Finishing :)

What I learned

With every project I do in Java and Android, I learn just a little bit more about the niches and pitfalls of mobile app development. I'm probably a bit more skilled than I did 24 hours ago.

What's next for Don't Delay

It would be interesting to connect to a data source that's more recent or even real time. Even if Don't Delay does not continue to develop, the base concept of data visualization for Android apps definitely has a lot of potential for many future projects!

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