We saw flights landing in nearby Tegel airport from our office, and wondered where all those airplanes came from. So I made this, and now we just ask Slack for answers. Also learned some Clojure.
The control tower bot supports any airport with scheduled flights in the world.
To look for flights use the command /spot followed by either the IATA code of the airport, the name of the city in english or random to look at a random airport e.g. /spot TXL or /spot Berlin.
If the control tower doesn't see any flights in the air, you get back the current weather in that location.
The airplane will sport the most common color for the airline it belongs to. Most airlines are included.
On Slack the bot needs permissions for slash commands, and incoming hooks. At work we have a dedicated channel #planespotting for planespotting where each sighting is posted, allowing everyone on comment on it.
Note:
- Running the spotting commands on the designated channel will post a response to that channel, visible to members
- Running the commands anywhere will post privately and is visible only to you -- this way you don't need to change channels
Airport data from OurAirports
Airline data comes from Aviation Stack
Airline colors to create the airplanes were kindly provided by the awesome folks at AirHex
Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com
Maps from MapBox and OpenStreetMap
Eclipse Public License 2.0