Live travel day board for every employee in the air

Build an app my travel and ops team opens on travel days to see every employee who is in the air right now. Nothing runs on a schedule and nothing fires in the background: a person opens the app, works the board, and closes it. It replaces the ritual of keeping a trip spreadsheet open in one tab and checking airline apps one flight at a time.

The main screen is a board of today's trips read from our Google Sheets trip roster using Get Values. A roster row has traveler name, department, flight number written like BA286, travel date in YYYY-MM-DD, origin and destination airport codes, and a handled column. Let me configure the spreadsheet ID, the tab and range, and which spreadsheet column maps to which field, so the app fits the sheet we already keep instead of forcing a new format on us.

Enrich every trip row live with AeroDataBox Get Flight Status by Date, looking the flight up by its number for that trip's local departure date. On each row show the flight status, gate, terminal, scheduled and revised arrival time, and the delay in minutes. Give delayed, diverted and cancelled rows an obvious visual state so a glance at the board tells me where the problems are.

Sort delayed, diverted and cancelled trips to the top of the board, then the rest by arrival time so the next people to land come next. Let me filter by department, and switch between a today view and a week ahead view covering the next seven days grouped by day. Show arrival times in the destination airport's local timezone with the airport code beside them, and use AeroDataBox Get Airport to resolve an airport's timezone and full name when the flight response does not carry it.

Clicking a traveler opens a detail panel beside the board. The panel shows their full itinerary legs pulled from AeroDataBox Get Flight History by Date Range for that flight number across the trip window, with each leg's route, times and status. Below the itinerary show the destination airport's current congestion from AeroDataBox Get Airport Delay Snapshot: the delay index and how many departures and arrivals are delayed or cancelled at that airport right now, so I can tell the difference between one late flight and a whole airport falling over.

From any row and from the detail panel I can post a disruption note to our travel channel with Slack Send a Message. Prefill the note with the traveler name, department, flight number, current status, revised arrival in destination local time and the delay in minutes, let me edit the text before it goes, and let me pick the destination channel using Slack List Channels with the last channel used remembered as the default. After a note posts, mark that row as notified with the time it was sent.

Marking a trip as handled writes back to the roster with Google Sheets Update Values, setting the handled column to yes along with who marked it and a timestamp, targeting that specific row's range. A handled trip keeps a badge and drops out of the top priority band but stays visible on the board, so the team can see a colleague already dealt with it rather than double contacting the traveler.

AeroDataBox is read only, so every write in this app lands in Google Sheets or Slack. It is also metered on a RapidAPI subscription with a free BASIC tier, so be deliberate about calls: only fetch flight status for the rows currently in view after filters are applied, cache the results for the refresh cycle so sorting, filtering and re-rendering never refetch, and give me a manual refresh button with a visible last updated time. In the week ahead view do not eagerly fetch every future day, fetch a day's statuses when I expand that day.

Degrade gracefully when data is thin. Live tracking coverage is strongest in Europe while static schedules cover most of the world, so when live status is missing show the scheduled times and label the row as scheduled rather than implying the flight is on time. If a flight number cannot be found or a lookup fails, keep the traveler on the board with a clear no flight data state so we fix the roster instead of losing a person. If we hit the flight data rate limit, say so plainly and keep showing the last cached values with their timestamp.