Classic Flight Radar

Premise

Develop a useful and interesting web application combining two or more JSON or XML web APIs.

My Plan

My idea is to use a combination of Google Maps with FlightAware’s FlightXML2 REST API to create a classic radar for nearby planes similar to what you see in old films in a submarine or on a military computer. Google Maps would be used to find a location to center your radar. Then the FlightXML API would be used to find flights from nearby airports. A HTML5 canvas will be used to draw out the radar and any blips that appear. I will be trying to make it look as much like a classic film radar as possible.

Image courtesy of pixbay

Possible Limitations

From my brief research on this flight API, it does not look like you can search for flights by location, only by airport, aircraft, or operator. So it’s possible flights flying overhead that don’t land in nearby airports won’t register on the radar. However, this still needs to be tested.