11 / Case study
Flightonics
A live global flight tracker rendered as an animated radar-style map.
- Python01
- Flask02
- Leaflet03
Calgary, ABMMVI KID
Same city.Brightertomorrows.
Hamodiiiiiii
The challenge
How can thousands of live aircraft and their recent paths remain legible on one continuously updating map?
Calgary
Realplacesrealprogress
Overview
Flightonics authenticates with the OpenSky Network API, retrieves live state vectors and recent trajectories, and renders aircraft on an interactive Leaflet map.
Build
A Flask backend refreshes and exports flight data on a schedule. The frontend
cleans paths, stitches current positions and uses haversine interpolation with
requestAnimationFrame to animate each aircraft. Last-Modified polling keeps
the map synchronized with new data.
Stack
Python, Flask, Requests, OAuth 2 client credentials, JavaScript, Leaflet and CARTO map tiles.