Flight Historian

Flight Historian was a personal flight tracking website I created, allowing me to map and review all airline flights I’ve taken. (It’s been superseded by my offline flight log.)

It allowed me to see details for any flight I’ve flown; I could also click on any airline, aircraft, airport, route, class, or tail number to see maps of all matching flights.

For every category such as airlines or airports, Flight Historian was able to show me which ones I’ve used the most.

Flight Historian supported adding flights directly from my boarding passes, either by emailing digital boarding passes from my phone or by scanning the barcode on my paper boarding passes. Since I’d already written the code to read boarding pass data, I also created a public boarding pass parser page. (With the retirement of Flight Historian, I’ve migrated the boarding pass parser to this site.)

Technical Details

GitHub: bogardpd / flight_historian

I wrote Flight Historian in Ruby on Rails, using a PostgreSQL database to store flight data.

The application used Mapbox GL JS to create interactive maps from automatically-generated GeoJSON map data. Each map could also be exported to GPX and KML geographic formats, and to a directed graph (with airports as nodes and flights as edges) in yEd-flavored GraphML.

Flight Historian could automatically import flights from Apple Wallet boarding passes shared via email, or from scanned paper boarding pass barcode data (in IATA BCBP format). It looked up additional flight details using the FlightAware AeroAPI.

Version History