Dataset. Commercial airplanes periodically send out radio messages containing their position details (plane identifier, flight number, latitude, longitude, height, speed, ...) . These ADS-B messages are picked up by enthusiasts and collected in systems such as the OpenSky network or Flightradar24. We have obtained ~200 GB of compressed ADS-B messages from September 2015 in a compressed format.

P2: Flight Routes. Determine standard flight routes between pairs of airports. Detect and visualize flights (and airlines) that diverge from them. Also determine and visualize how much CO2 could be saved by flying directly?

Summary: This group used Spark with Scala and Java for large-scale data extraction and aggregation, creating algorithm for flight detection and flight clustering. This allows them to define default flying routes and non-default flying routes between a source and destination airport. There is a visualization that characterizes non-default routes in terms of their fuel efficiency.

Data curiosity: ****
Paper writing: ***
Technical difficulties mastered: ***
Visualization coolness: ***