Working on a flight tracking tool that records the landing and takeoff actions of a local airfield to get insights in how they determine on which runway a takeoff or landing is assigned. Problem is that all the free aircraft api's don't register a landing or takeoff act and also not on which runway.

The airport in question has just one runway and is situated in a dense population area. Both sides of the runway are used (officially noted as two runways) for takeoff and landing causing noise complaints in the neighborhood. The airfield says it assigns a runway based on wind direction and speed, and when there is much traffic they relieve one of the two directions to prevent going over a threshold. My goals is to check if they follow their own rules and just to have a insight if my annoyance over why there are so many aircraft over my house and not on the other side is justified or not.

As a frontender this is quite challenging. I'm using Express with typescript to write the backend. Usually I get bored quite quickly because progress is not going fast enough, so I'm using a lot of AI to speed things up.

I'm checking for aircraft in a 5km circle every 30 seconds. If a aircraft is below and above x feet than I'm going to track it every 5 seconds. Between each entry I'm checking the coordinates and altitude to determine which runway (direction) is used and if it's taking off or landing. I'm also using another API to get weather data like wind speed and wind direction. Finally this is saved in a JSON file (for now) and loaded into the frontend to be displayed in a table.

I do have a working prototype, and removing a few bugs. At the moment it's checking the logs after a day of collecting to check for errors, fixing those errors and validating the fix the next day. When it's done I'm planning to open source it so that anyone can use it if needed.