Airport pickup dispatch board with live flight ETAs

I coordinate airport pickups and I want a dispatch board that my coordinators keep open for their entire shift. This is a working surface, not a notifier. The point is that one person can see every pickup happening today, immediately spot the ones that have broken, and fix them from the card without leaving the app.

Today's pickups come from an Airtable table. Use Airtable List Records to load them, filtered to today's scheduled pickup date. Each row holds the passenger name, the inbound flight number, the assigned driver, the driver mobile number and the scheduled pickup time. Let me set the base, the table and the mapping from my column names to those fields in a settings view, so I can point the board at the base I already run on without renaming anything.

Every card shows the live inbound status pulled from AeroDataBox Get Flight Status, looked up by the flight number on the row. Show the arrival terminal, the actual or estimated landing time, the flight status, and most importantly the drift: how far the current ETA has moved away from the pickup time recorded in Airtable, rendered as a signed value such as +35 min late or -15 min early. AeroDataBox is read only, so it never writes anything back. It is display and sort data only, and every write in this app goes to Airtable.

Pickups whose ETA has drifted by more than a configurable threshold, defaulting to twenty minutes in either direction, surface in a Needs attention lane pinned to the top of the board, so the coordinator fixes the broken ones before anything else. Cancelled and diverted flights, and any pickup with no driver assigned, also belong in that lane regardless of drift. A card leaves the lane once the coordinator has bumped the pickup time to match the new ETA or explicitly acknowledged the card.

From a card I can do four things. Assign or reassign a driver, and bump the pickup time, both of which write back through Airtable Update Record. Text the assigned driver the revised plan through ClickSend Send SMS, with the message prefilled with the passenger name, flight number, terminal and the new pickup time, and editable before it sends. Move the card through Assigned, En route and Completed, writing the new status back to Airtable as well. Record the timestamp and body of the last text on the card, so a coordinator can see at a glance which drivers have already been told and does not send the same update twice.

Add a configurable customs and baggage buffer. Look up the arrival airport with AeroDataBox Get Airport and use the airport country to decide whether the arrival is international relative to my home country, then add the international buffer, defaulting to 45 minutes, or the domestic buffer, defaulting to 20 minutes, to the landing time to produce the revised ETA. Both buffer values and my home country are editable in settings. Show the arithmetic on the card so the number is never mysterious: landing time plus buffer equals revised pickup ETA.

Sort the whole board by revised ETA rather than by the scheduled pickup time, so the passenger who is actually on the ground next is always at the top. Keep the Needs attention lane above the rest, sorted the same way.

Practical notes to build in. The AeroDataBox key is quota metered, so only poll flight status for the cards currently visible on the board, refresh on a sensible interval with a manual refresh button, and cache the last known status per flight number rather than refetching per render. Airtable Update Record is a PATCH, so send only the fields that actually changed and leave the rest of the row alone. Airtable batch updates cap at ten records per call, so if you add a bulk reschedule action, chunk it into groups of ten. ClickSend requires full E.164 numbers with a leading plus and country code, so normalize the driver mobile coming out of Airtable before sending and show a clear inline error on the card when a number cannot be used.