Develop a Scalable Application System

The Challenge

Develop a scalable application system with the means to quickly process large amounts of data into effective flight quotes, and create plans that take into account an array of data. This data included historical Boeing winds data, current weather and wind data, as well as prevailing fuel prices within the target airports.

Specific Performance

Given the historical dataset spanning 15 years, This Dot Labs restructured the existing schema to be more efficient and offer better data integrity. This Dot Labs added additional audit tracking, and incurred no data loss while moving all database operations to Amazon RDS with multi-az for failover.

Rules from the existing system were extracted to create a base set of existing specifications. Flight and pilot systems were significantly overhauled with new requested features, and new FAA requirements were taken into account. The system was re-written to take advantage of Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, allowing the ability to add automatic scale to the application, in particular, the ability to calculate operations during usage peak times.

The frontend was designed to offer real-time quotes, and route calculations, using a custom JavaScript controller implementation. Real time mapping operations generation utilized Google Maps API for visuals. The fueling system was designed into a standard API for 15+ FBO’s, and allowed per route fuel purchasing. Real-time boards for weather, pilot FAA status, and aircraft status were also implemented.

Average time to run a quote for a new customer dropped from 3.5 minutes to less than 45 seconds. Quote accuracy, in comparison to actual running costs, increased 45% via new fuel system.

The offline-first web development approach allows dispatchers to continue to run quotes, and design flight routes, even in locations with poor or high latency Internet connectivity. Said approach was vetted by Google Chrome engineers as an “impressive implementation.”