There are lots of apps and websites out there for airline enthusiasts to indulge their passion, from the likes of the popular flight tracking app Flight Radar 24, or the Flyer Talk forum, but one United Airlines fan discovered that none of these sites fulfilled his needs.
That’s why Jonah Berg from Los Angeles used his extensive coding skills to create his very own operations dashboard for United Airlines that is now publicly available to anyone who wants to take their geek out on.
Dubbed the Blue Board, Jonah set about creating a live dashboard that wouldn’t look out of place at United’s operations control center based in its headquarters at Willis Tower in downtown Chicago.
“Been working on this for a while and figured it was ready to share,” Jonah said in a post shared on Reddit, which has earned him plaudits from avgeeks around the world.
The amount of data on the Blue Board is truly impressive:
- A live map which plots the location of 600+ United Airlines flights across the globe.
- A hub monitor that tracks the status of United’s main bases in Chicago O’Hare, Denver, Houston, Newark, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington Dulles.
- An irregular operations (IRROPS) monitor that scores against cancellations, delays, diversions, and FAA ground stops.
- A database of United’s entire fleet of more than 1,175+ aircraft.
- A Starlink Wi-Fi tracker that shows which aircraft have been retrofitted with the satellite internet service.
- And a whole library of other useful stats.
Admittedly, the Blue Board utilizes open source data from a variety of other sources, including Flight Radar 24, as well as other United Airlines passion projects, such as the United Fleet Website, which is not affiliated with the airline and was created by enthusiasts.
Nonetheless, bringing all of this data together in one easy-to-view website is something that even international airlines struggle to do – at least not without spending millions of dollars to pay external vendors.
Given that United Airlines is increasingly known for its investment in IT and bespoke applications that have made it stand out from the crowd, here’s hoping that Jonah gets a call from someone at the airline to discuss this achievement.
What apps or websites do you use to feed your avgeek passion? Flight Radar 24 and the Flighty app are in my stack, along with Flight Aware for mass cancellation and disruption data.
Cool now do AA
Totally cool! Your link goes direct to the we page and I saved it as a favorite. Many thanks!
It’s awesome but I need other airlines as well.
This is more information than you can find on UA internal systems in one place!
United (or anyone else) would hate all this information being easily accessible. First off it allows lay people to easily second guess operational decisions, second, it can be used by competitors to evaluate their operations more closely to find advantages. Lastly, a nefarious third party could use it to target the said airline for other purposes, like manipulate stock.
Personally, the guy could enhance it further by training an AI container to catch FAA policy violations of on ramp behaviors, or collect data on ATC landing slot performance, the list goes on.
I urge United to stay this transparent. What an awesome collection of information and let’s keep in mind tools have always had amazing and nefarious uses as well. Think hammer….
Thanks for sharing, this is wonderful to get ahead of the game during IRROPS and yes some disinterested UAL employees will not like having their work checked but that’s okay!!