route3

I couldn't agree more with your final thought. I assumed there may only be one or two diverted flights in a day, and certainly a handful more during winter weather, etc.

I clearly remember when I finally let my initial prototype run on a laptop for a day and ignored it, an old HP laptop just chugging away parsing flight plan data, plugged in and running too hot in my office. By the next day I had > 20 diversions, with no notable weather, and assumed I had a bug in my logic.

Lots more to do here, including adding some weather details and someday predictive analytics. Thanks again for checking it out and the feedback.

Finally getting around to sharing my long overdue side project that I had started back in Jan 2021.

The data processing is handled by two EC2's running Java to parse the FAA's flight plan feed. Peak midday that's running about ~65msgs/sec, a reduced and manageable number because I'm filtering for major airlines only (no GA, no bizjet, etc). The cleaned-up and filtered flight plan data heads to both Postgres for storage as well as SQS.

Consuming the SQS messages is a Python app that's crunching flight plans and confirming each flight is still heading to it's original destination (thanks redis!). If the destination airport changes, the flight gets flagged and some add'l business logic runs.

Ultimately you get the frontend (Django) presented here with a sprinkling of terrible JS to get the map and some timeline data.

I've been hacking with the FAA's SWIM data feeds for a few years now and hope to start sharing more of the technical details. Happy to answer any questions or hear some feedback!

I don't think I've seen FlightAware showing aircraft tracks on the ground.

They do show taxi times for arriving/departing aircraft and I wonder if they are stitching that data together using the STDDS feed.

To give you an example, for an arriving aircraft you would get an alert of "wheels down", which is as literal as it sounds: a timestamped event when the aircraft made contact with the ground. In addition to ground position events (allowing the tracking you see here), you would also receive an alert when the aircraft left the tracked movement surface, i.e. transitioned to the gate/ramp area and no longer on an active airport surface.

(Pretty sure I have that correct, it's been awhile since I got back to my STDDS-powered projects. If anybody familiar with STDDS wants to chime in, please do!)

For the curious, all these "alerts" are JMS messages with XML payloads. Pretty much non-stop stream of data, incredibly fun if you're a developer+av geek. For FlightAware-style tracking without using any ADS-B you'll want to subscribe to the SFDPS feed. You'll get position updates every 60 sec for all airborne flights in the US, which last week amounted to ~40GB in my Postgres DB. You can request higher resolution reporting which is every 12s.

Yes, this is surprising. Twilio has a reputation of being awfully transparent -- they had a billing systems issue back in July and handled it quite well, IIRC. They also do a great job with their developer evangelist program.

I wonder if someone has created a pricing matrix/table that updates and compares the SMS/voice API providers. For example, I know Plivo is slightly cheaper for SMS, domestically (USA). A price comparison table might make a good holiday project :)

Although I understand this wouldn't help your case. As you pointed out, the SMS provider would have already increased rates by the time you could be notified of increases.