Jets - Flight & Seat Advisor - an application to select seats in airplanes

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The idea of ​​the application arose a long time ago, I nursed her for more than a year, I started writing on my own, but everything wasn’t time and effort in the evenings. As a result, at some point a team of 3 people gathered with burning eyes, left the permanent job and seriously plunged into the project. A few days ago - started in the Travel section.

Quite briefly - our application contains a large database of passenger airlines and their fleet. For each of the airplanes, we made detailed and very beautiful layouts of their cabins, on which we show the location of classes, rows, partitions and other interiors, highlighting “special” places with colors.
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Each company buys a new aircraft at the factory with an almost empty cabin and already personally orders its “tuning” for it, arranging chairs and toilets to fit its needs. Because of this, the seats within one class can be quite different in terms of comfort. The first row of seats in front of emergency exits has many times more legroom, and the last row in front of the toilets can be locked backs of chairs and regularly crowded people in the queue. Many airplanes have solid areas in the hull and instead of a wonderful view of the burning engine, you can get on the blank wall. There are a lot of nuances and there is a certain probability to get on a seat with a locked back, an electric box under the legs and a shelf for hand luggage occupied by life jackets. You will remember this 11 hour transatlantic flight for a long time. And here we rush into the scene!


We collected from different sources the showroom scheme (sometimes even the owners' websites lie) and comments on the seats for approximately 400 aircraft. Everything is beautifully structured, you can watch samples of aircraft by carriers, or vice versa, airlines having the aircraft of the desired type. (This may help when the schemes of a specific “your” company were not found in the application, look like it happens to others.)

The size of the base was originally planned more, but we flew several times with the release dates, we will gradually replenish it in the updates. For the 1.0.0 version, we drew the Boeings 737-777 and the Airbus A320 - A340; Avro, Canadair, Embraer, McDonnell Douglas planes are waiting for their turn. The list of airlines includes 80 companies, but first of all we were guided by the TOP-20 of the world, they are very good, while there are no many low-cost airlines and Russian carriers yet. (Actually, only Aeroflot represents Russia so far).



The entire base is completely offline, no roaming is a problem for you to use it in the field. This was done because many airlines, in addition to online booking, provide the opportunity to choose a place directly on the check-in at the airport, and not everyone can quickly find Wi-Fi in the queue before the gate.

In addition to the catalog, Jets has a wonderfully styled and animated online search for flights by their numbers. It is necessary to find out the specific type of aircraft, if it is not specified in your ticket. Several planes can be used on the same flight on different days, we also show this and let us choose a date. The disadvantages include the fact that operators provide information about their aircraft only 5-7 days before departure, when booking tickets a month before the trip - it is impossible to recognize the model. The information provider is flightaware.com , we really liked the API they provided. So far, very few calls are used from it, but we will gradually increase the weight of the “online” part of the application.



It’s too early to talk about statistics, we fight through the top of the Travel section. Plans for the development of the application a huge amount, enough for the year ahead. We will be constantly updated, simultaneously increasing the volume of the database and the detailed schema. There will be translations into other languages, the Lite version, possibly with an In-App purchase. Add a search for airports, any technical information and statistics on airplanes and air carriers (a bunch of paranoids have already gathered who are interested in the number of drops), a system for rating users by the boards and many, many other chips.

I’ll say right away that at this stage we don’t have much to offer Russian users, there are only three Aeroflot Airbus schemes. First of all, they aimed at the American market, although now it’s clear from sales that they are only 40%, and Europe is also very pleased. I think, I will add some analytics for promotion or a detailed story about the development process a bit later, we walked through all the possible rakes.

Thank you for reading. If interested - distributing promotional codes.