My Role
Full-stack product engineer
All Projects
Interactive buildFlagship case study
Flight Tracker
Live Aircraft, Airport & Route Intelligence
Aircraft, airport, and route information is fragmented across feeds, making live operational context difficult to understand in one interface.
Interactive preview
Full demoWhat I Built
Real-time flight intelligence platform engineered with Next.js and React that resolves natural-language queries into canonical flight, airport, and route URLs. Fuses live telemetry from Flightradar24, ADS-B.lol, OpenSky, and adsbdb with a custom flight-phase classification engine, geospatial tracking, Leaflet map visualizations, dynamic airport boards, and fault-tolerant data pipelines.
Evidence
Working interface, documented system behavior, and implementation-level decisions.
Technical Architecture
From system input to explainable output.
The control gate is shown as a first-class stage, not an afterthought added around the workflow.
Technical Decisions
- Integrated and fused live aviation data from Flightradar24, ADS-B.lol, OpenSky, adsbdb, and BigDataCloud, implementing fallback logic for incomplete or unavailable upstream responses.
- Built a geospatial tracking system calculating great-circle distances, aircraft progress, estimated touchdown times, and on-blocks times from live telemetry.
- Implemented persistent aircraft contacts with TTL-based expiration and intelligent polling to prevent radar traffic from disappearing during transient API failures.
- Built dynamic airport arrival/departure boards and route intelligence views by sweeping radar coverage along geographic corridors and correlating aircraft with filed routes.
Security Considerations
- The public case study makes no additional security claim beyond the documented controls shown in the architecture.
Outcome & Evidence
- Engineered a real-time flight intelligence platform using Next.js and React that resolves natural-language flight, airport, and route queries into canonical, shareable URLs.
- Architected fault-tolerant real-time data pipelines that gracefully degrade during feed failures while avoiding misleading or fabricated flight data.
Flight TrackerReal-Time DataNext.jsReactTypeScriptGeospatialLeafletTelemetry FusionLive Radar
Working product
Try the interactive demo.
The product experience is part of this case study. Explore it here, reset its state, or switch viewport sizes without leaving the project page.
flight-tracker.zainkhalilkhan.com
This is the actual deployed application, embedded live from zk-flight-tracker.vercel.app. If it doesn't load below (some browsers block third-party embeds), open it directly.
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Client-side sandbox. State is in memory and nothing is sent to a server.
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