Flight Board
v2.

Real-time kanban flight status display for defense aviation. Mounted on kiosk TVs across the hangar, pilot lounge, flight ops, and classroom. Zero interaction required — it just runs.

Power Pages Azure SQL Liquid JavaScript CSS Grid Intune Kiosk

Active

Up Next

Standby

Demo only, not final product

—why it works

Marketing Slop.

Training Required

Mounted on TVs across four locations. No logins, no onboarding, no user manual. If it needs explanation, it's broken.

Source of Truth

Flight ops, maintenance, safety, and the front office all read the same board. No more radio calls to ask what's happening.

30s

To Plan Your Day

Glance up, know everything. UP NEXT means move. STANDBY means relax. No spreadsheets. No walking to ops.

8hr

Weather Forecast

Decoded METAR, compass rose, 8-hour TAF strip — readable from 30 feet. Go/no-go calls without pulling out a phone.

24/7

Always Current

Flights migrate automatically. Weather refreshes live. Notifications push safety alerts. Zero maintenance overhead.

Locations, 1 System

Hangar, pilot lounge, flight ops, classroom — same data, same second. One URL. Deploy once, runs everywhere.

—how it works

Nerd Out.

Single IIFE, 13 sections — all JS inlined in one HTML file. ES5 syntax. Power Pages constraint — no build tools, no frameworks.
3x3 CSS master grid — --fb-gap universal buffer at every nesting level. Kanban cells are 8-row × 2-column sub-grids. Tiles size via grid-row: span — zero JS layout math.
Synced paging engine — buildAndShowPages() orchestrates all 3 columns. Column with most pages sets the 30s tick. paginateTiles() auto-selects single vs dual column mode per page.
Slide animation — animateTurn() staggers tiles out bottom-first (60ms apart), fires applyPendingMoves() in the blank, staggers new tiles in. Headers stay via z-index.
Notification push — claimNotifyRows(col, N, 'top'|'bottom') makes notifications real grid children. _availRows recalculates, forcePageRebuild() re-renders immediately.
Weather pipeline — generateWeather() builds a 24hr model. refreshWeather() mutates live data every 20 sim minutes with full VFR/MVFR/IFR/LIFR recalc. METAR string built from live state.
Flight generator — clusters of 1-4, 15min snapping, staggered starts. ~15% cancelled, ~10% rescheduled 2-4hrs later. All data validated before render.
Performance — WeakMap tile refs for O(1) lookup. DOM swaps only on 30s page turns. Pill/countdown text updates in-place. Per-column selective animation — static columns untouched.
Intune kiosk deploy — no auth, no session, stateless. Page loads on locked TVs and runs 24/7. Background images crossfade on weather changes. cancelAnimationFrame on unload.

brain.

Government Weather APIs

Flight Plans

Aircraft Details

Student Details

Safety

Weather. Flights. Done.

—lessons learned

The takeaway.

This project proved something I keep coming back to: the hardest part of building a data system isn't the data or the system — it's knowing what question the room is actually asking. Every technical decision on this board — the grid architecture, the paging engine, the notification push system — exists because someone in a pilot lounge needed an answer they could read from across the room without touching anything.

That's the pattern. Figure out what people actually need, build the ontology to serve it, and then get out of the way. The board runs itself. That's the point.

Flight Boardv2.