July 28, 2025
Day 45 - Live Flight Tracking
What I Learned
Today, I focused on implementing live flight tracking functionality for our flight delay prediction dashboard. The goal is to fetch real time aircraft data and display it alongside our predictive insights to enhance situational awareness. I explored how Flightradar24 API work and how they provide live aircraft positions, flight numbers, altitudes, coordinates, and more. While working through their structure, I gained a better understanding of the importance of parameters such as bounding boxes, aircraft ICAO codes, and flight numbers when making API requests. I also learned that live tracking APIs often come with certain limitations like authentication keys, IP restrictions, or undocumented endpoints that require careful reverse engineering or access through browser tools.
Blockers
Despite making some progress, I encountered several blockers while trying to make API calls to FR24. Due to sudden notice to implement live tracking, I had to read the API docs in short time making it difficult to understand what parameters are required or supported.
Reflection
While it’s easy to conceptualize a feature like “live flight tracking” actually implementing it involves understanding not just the technical API endpoints, but also dealing with limitations around access, rate limits, and data formatting. I also learned that live data often comes with issues like blocked access, which makes development slower. Still, I think adding live tracking will make the dashboard much more useful and realistic. If I continue to have problems with FR24, I’ll look into other sources like OpenSky or ADS-B Exchange.