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What's that plane flying overhead?

I live underneath a flight path for airplanes arriving at LaGuardia Airport in New York. When I hear the planes, I get curious: where are those people coming from? I wrote this to find out. You can read more about my feelings here.

How does this work?

On the Raspberry Pi, we're running Dump1090 to handle the hard work of determining what planes are in the sky nearby. Piggybacking on Dump1090's JSON, dump1090_to_nearest_flight.py outputs the flight number and change-in-altitude of the nearest plane, optionally restricting that plane to a given area and/or altitude . flight_number_to_departure_airport.py translates that flight number, using a database, to the mostly likely non-NYC airport that is that flight's departure airport or destination. display_letters.py displays that airport's code (and, maybe, eventually, the city name for non-US airports).

Build your own

Follow the instructions! If something seems wrong or could be improved upon, please submit a pull request.

If you need to draw an area for your favorite flight path, use geojson.io. That's what I used to generate laguardia_area.geojson.

TODO

  • look up airport names for non-US airports and display them too. (Where right now we'd display EGLL, we should instead display EGLL (London Heathrow, UK)).
  • maybe also track noise. cf. http://webtrak5.bksv.com/panynj4
  • it appears Southwest's airplanes may broadcast their flight number as just the number, i.e. 539, not SWA539.

Theoretically Askable Questions

Are you a NIMBY who is opposed to noise, airplanes, travel, etc.?

Nah. I can hear the planes, but it's not really annoying. I'm not worried or angry, just curious about the world around me... :)

I do have a cat named Nimby though.

But airplanes flying overhead could crash on you! They are dangerous!

No, they're not. Please don't contact me anymore.

Why isn't this Python 3 compatible?

I couldn't get the Adafruit Python LED Backpack library working in Python 3. That's probably because I'm bad at Python, not on them.

I have an idea to make this better. Can I send you a pull request?

Yes, please. I would like that very much.

I would like to thank the Academy...

This project would have been impossible without:

  1. the maintainers of dump1090 and the Mutability fork.
  2. the maintainers of the Virtual Radar Server FlightNumbers dump.
  3. @calus at the FlightAware forums who pointed me there.
  4. Adafruit for their cool hardware and libraries.
  5. Sam Keddy who created the Thintel font I'm using.