ecoJet

• 

• 

• 

• 

  Flight Details

• 

Inspiration

Our team members all love to travel and see more of the world whenever possible but are well aware of the major ecological costs of air travel. We wanted to create something to help empower consumers with the knowledge needed to make conscientious decisions about how they fly.

What it does

ecoJet acts as a standard flight search engine, but with some powerful new features! A user can input a range of travel dates, origin/destinations, and airlines. In addition to the standard data any search engine will give you about your flights, ecoJet will also tell you the your estimated fuel burned per 100km.

We also allow users to filter flights by aircraft type, allowing for conscientious selection of what aircraft one wants to fly. The type of airplane you fly on has a massive effect on the carbon footprint of that flight. Aircraft in service today can be up to 5x less efficient than other aircraft in service. Despite this nearly no one actively chooses a flight based on the aircraft servicing that flight, ecoJet hopes to change this.

How we built it

We built it as a progressive web app in Javascript with Node.js. We used the Lufthansa group scheduling API for getting our flight data. We then inputted fuel burn rate numbers for all the aircraft types available from studies. The app is blazing fast as a result, and can return 1000s of possible flights in a couple of seconds.

Challenges we ran into

Overall the project ran rather smoothly. The UI isn't beautiful as we're all back-end people, but it functions.

The largest problem was being rate limited by the flight schedules API. It will randomly throttle us and caused some major problems mid development. This can be easily remedied by an email to Lufthansa support (asking for a higher limit), but given this project was all done over the weekend, that wasn't an option :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really happy with how fast the app gets flight data. We are able to load nearly the entire Lufthansa group flight schedule for a week range, in a few seconds. Our app is currently far faster than essentially any standard flight search app we've found in commercial operation.

We're also very pleased that all the data we're using is real, actionable data. This isn't a toy dataset or any stand-in data, the app as-is already has real utility.

What we learned

We learned a lot more about how atrocious air travel is for the environment. Simultaneously we learned a a ton about how much variation there is between aircraft types in fuel burn. Depending on your aircraft you can be burning four times as much fuel as someone flying the same route but on a different aircraft type.

We also gained a lot of experience interacting with an industry level API. In addition we obtained a lot more development experience in JS/Node and in making PWAs.

What's next for JetSafe

-Support for more airlines -Total fuel burned calculation -Better UI/UX -Ability to order the results -Data visualizations of fuel burn -Integration with booking sites

Built With

• firebase
• javascript
• lufthansa
• node.js