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Flight Tracking App

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Zafar Bhayat
    Twitter
Whole Dashboard

Introduction

I’ve always been fascinated by air travel—the logistics, the engineering, and yes, even the airport experience. That curiosity eventually turned into something more: a personal project to track every flight I’ve taken.

It all started when I flew from Newark (EWR) to Toronto (YYZ) and felt convinced I was on the exact same aircraft on the return trip. That little hunch sparked a much bigger idea: what if I could track not just where I was flying, but what aircraft I was on, how many miles I was covering, and how frequently I was flying certain airlines?

So I built a custom, interactive, purpose built dashboard for my own personal use.

What I built:

This is a fully interactive flight dashboard that tracks:

  • Every aircraft I’ve flown on
  • Flight paths across the world
  • Aircraft type and manufacturer
  • Total flight miles by airline
  • Airport and airline frequency
  • Cumulative flight activity over time

Tech Stack

  • PostgreSQL (AWS RDS) — for storing all flight data
  • Python — automates data ingestion and cleaning
  • Power BI — visualization, interactivity, and calculations
  • DAX — custom filtering, aggregation, and date metrics
  • OpenStreetMap — renders the global flight paths
  • Flightradar24 — source of live aircraft and KML path data
  • Airfleets.net — additional aircraft details
Schema

How It Works

  1. Flight Tracking

    • I pull each aircraft’s KML path from Flightradar24.
    • Match the plane using tail number to get model, airline, and route metadata.

  2. Data Pipeline

    • A Python script fetches and formats the data.
    • Pushes data into PostgreSQL using structured schema (Flights, Aircraft, Airports, Routes).

  3. Visualization in Power BI

    • The map uses OpenStreetMap and Leaflet tile layers.
    • Treemaps show aircraft manufacturer breakdowns.
    • Bar charts and line graphs track mileage, airline frequency, and usage trends over time.
    • Star schema used to define clean relationships and allow filtering by multiple fields.

  4. Advanced Filtering

    • Filter by airport, aircraft type, airline, date range, and mileage bands.
    • Automatically updates key stats and visuals.

📊 Key Stats (from June 2022 - February 2025)

  • 44 total flights

  • 20 unique airports

  • 43 different aircraft flown

  • 56,666 miles flown

  • Top Airlines by Flights: American Airlines, Air Canada, United Airlines

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