Vistara Hackathon 2017

India’s largest aviation hackathon, the Vistara Hackathon, was conducted on the 7th and 8th of October 2017 at Delhi NCR and Bengaluru simultaneously. I participated in the hackathon along with 4 other members from my FOSS club, with the group name “The TechnoCrats”. The theme was #DisruptionInAviation. It was my first hackathon, for a total duration of 30 hours, which sounded intimidating at first, but it wasn’t so bad. The venue was the KStart office at Bengaluru, a beautiful place to work. We found ourselves a cabin and got to work on our project.

Our project was called Track and Travel(T&T). It was a web application on the Django framework. Let me explain to you how it works. Imagine you have a flight to catch and once you reach the airport on time, you get to know that your flight is delayed by 2 hours. Sad, isn’t it? Had you known about the delay while you were at home, you could have used those 2 hours more productively. That’s where we come in to help you. If your flight is delayed, we notify you about it beforehand, by tracking down the flight on the air network. Thus, you can know when your flight is late. We show you where your flight currently is on the map. We also tell you when to leave your current location to the airport, after analysing the distance and the traffic along the way.

But all this seems pretty normal, right? Anyone can do this. What’s special is that the whole process is completely automated. All you have to do is sign in with your Google account. As soon as your flight ticket reaches your email, we take the information from your inbox, build your itinerary for you and tell you everything you need to know about your flight. It’s as simple as that.

We made it to the final pitching round, which consisted of the top 20 teams, but we couldn’t make it to the top three. We’re not disappointed, though. The whole experience was fun and fruitful. Looking forward to more hackathons.