Python — Flight Data Generation

Build a Kafka Producer with Python

Image by Lars Nissen from Pixabay.

Wow, it’s already Day 11 of the Python Data Science December. Today we start a new data science project about generating airplane location data. In the end, we will build something similar to what you might know from Flightradar24, but much smaller. 😃

The screenshot was taken from Flightradar24.

We will not only learn about Python, Kafka & Pykafka but also about important data architectural concepts like separation of concerns & decoupling. But more about this later.

This story will be further continued as part of my Python — Data Science December series. All resources, datasets, required Python libraries & installations are listed at the end of the story, in the chapter Summary & Resources.

✈️ Getting Airplane Locations

Well, the first challenge is getting real-time flight or airplane location data. And that’s already the first challenge I could not solve. I found some good APIs like Aviationstack, but the free tier offers only 100 requests. That’s simply not enough for our project. Perhaps you know some good free or cheap APIs?