The artsiest window seat picture I’ve got (admit it, we’ve all tried something like this). – Photo: Jake Grant

There are many programming languages out there, as my computer science major friends would tell you. Perhaps you’ve heard of a few notable ones like Java, Python, and C. This past semester, I took a class solely dedicated to MATLAB, which is has a reasonable claim to be the worst of them all. A glorified calculator, MATLAB is good for matrix multiplication and approximately nothing else, in my humble opinion. How does this relate to aviation, you ask? Good question!

Basically, this had to become code CDG – Photo: Air France

In this class, a series of coding puzzles, we messed around with web APIs and other applications. That’s where the planes come in. Naturally, I decided if I had to do a convoluted project, I would do it about something I actually liked. I took my programming language to flightstats.com and started digging.