fleetR: Airline Fleet Explorer Documentation
Preface
This book documents my entry for Posit’s 2025 Table Contest, fleetR: Airline Fleet Explorer.
The Method Behind the Madness
Why did you do it that way?
In my limited years of experience on this Earth (23 of them and some change), I find that thinking about things is hard.1 Writing about them is perhaps even harder. I can’t help my mental tendencies to make simplifying assumptions about the world and hope that you, dear reader, will magically share those same assumptions.
But I’m going to try anyway. To that end, this documentation should leave you with these two things:
- An understanding of how to reproduce my entry with the provided code;
- An understanding of the state of mind when embarking on a project like this;
I think that point two is just as important as point one because, if you’re like me, you’ll venture on a project like this one and have several “what the %@$&*! is going on?” moments along the way. Which is great, and a little daunting. Point being that seeing someone else navigate these decision points is often helpful for understanding how to navigate your own projects (I hope, again with the assumptions).
So hopefully this will read like a little story, we’ll journey through it together and have more or less an understanding of how to embark on a “software” project.2
Disclaimer
I’m not a lawyer. The extent of my legal education is Suits and Better Call Saul, neither of which I would say are particularly shining examples of legal conduct (Louis Litt might take offense to that). But it’s worth noting that this project is in no way affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise approved by United Airlines, and that any media assets of United Airlines are used under the presumption of fair use. This site contains only publicly available information. The same goes for data sources which this project pulls from, namely the United Fleet Site project, OpenSky network contributors, adsb.lol contributors, and ADSB-DB. If you use/fork the repo code, you’re generally agreeing with the provisions of the MIT license. You can read up on it here if you’d like, but generally it means that you’re free to do with the source code as you please (keeping in mind some aforementioned points about fair use, etc.) and that this software is presented as-is, without warranty (i.e., use discretion when relying on this data, especially given the limitations I outline in this book). Refer to the original sources of information for their terms of use.