Senior Design Project — Spring 2026
A senior design project that visualizes recorded helicopter flights in 3D alongside METAR weather data and historical radar.
The Mission
The Brazos Safety Systems Weather Application provides insight into weather conditions that affect aviation operations. Weather plays a critical role in flight safety, and understanding conditions during flight operations can help explain incidents or risky behavior that occur. The application integrates aviation weather data sources, including METAR reports and radar imagery, to visualize weather conditions around airports and during historical flights. Users can upload flight records and review the weather conditions associated with those flights through the application. By presenting aviation weather data in a centralized and accessible format, the application supports post-flight analysis and helps identify weather-related factors associated with flight incidents. The goal is to provide insights that assist in understanding past flight conditions and help prevent similar issues in future aviation operations.
Upload a GPS flight track CSV and the system parses coordinates, altitude, heading, pitch, and roll — then resolves the nearest airport for the departure, arrival, and any interval points along the route.
The flight replays as an animated 3D aircraft on a real-terrain globe. A glowing path trail with altitude curtain lines shows the full route, and the timeline can be paused, scrubbed, or sped up.
Fetches METAR observations for the departure and arrival airports from NOAA ADDS, with automatic failover to CheckWX. Rain, snow, fog, and cloud layers are rendered directly in the 3D scene based on the reported conditions.
Displays NEXRAD composite radar frames from Iowa State Mesonet synced to the flight timeline — with 5-minute intervals and ±15 minutes of padding around the recorded flight duration.
The People
CS/DS/CITE seniors collaborating to build a weather visualization system for helicopter flight paths.
Team Lead & Full Stack
Full Stack & Radar Visualization
Cesium Weather Visualization
Full Stack
Backend
Backend
Cesium Weather Visualization
Under the Hood
Key technologies and system parameters behind the flight visualization and weather data pipeline.
| Primary METAR Source | NOAA ADDS / Iowa Environmental Mesonet |
| Backup METAR Source | CheckWX API (automatic failover) |
| Radar Data | NEXRAD composites — Iowa State Mesonet |
| Radar Frame Interval | 5-minute frames ± 15 min padding |
| Weather Effects | Rain, snow, fog, cloud layers (METAR-driven) |
| Cloud Coverage Levels | FEW / SCT / BKN / OVC |
| 3D Globe Engine | CesiumJS v1.116 with World Terrain |
| Backend Framework | Django + Django REST Framework |
| Database | PostgreSQL (hosted on Supabase) |
| Caching | Redis (10-minute METAR TTL) |
| Airport Resolution | airportsdata library + custom ICAO table |
| Distance Formula | Haversine great-circle (km) |
| Aircraft Model Format | GLB (3D, with heading/pitch/roll) |
Acknowledgments
Documents are sensitive