Building B2C And B2B Apps to Help a Startup Airline Take Off

Industria

Client

A newly launched, US-based airline offering charter flights to short- and medium-haul destinations, aiming to be a cloud-based and entirely paperless business. As a startup, their business model lent itself well to fully digitalized operations. Their ambitious growth plans also required a flexible, scalable digital infrastructure to manage the growing numbers of staff and customers.

Challenge

To achieve their digital-first aspirations, the client knew they wanted to allow their customers and staff to self-serve as much as possible. However, these would need to be designed and built from the ground up and sit within a complex ecosystem of third-party software and multiple sources of data ingestion. It was decided that two mobile apps would be created:

A customer app that allowed users to self-serve almost every pre-departure action item
An employee app that enabled the crew to manage pre- and post-flight logistics

Solution

The team decided to create a mono repo for each app, which offered several advantages:

Visibility (everyone can see everyone else’s code; this leads to better collaboration and cross-team contributions)
Consistency (code quality standards and a unified style)
Shared timelines between front and backend
Implicit CI

Strapi CMS was hosted in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as a container connecting to an RDS MySQL instance. Amazon ECS is a fully managed container orchestration service that allows engineers to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications. GitHub actions were used for all CI/CD pipelines and Datadog for log aggregation, alarms, infra visualization, and service uptime monitoring.

Every week we delivered product increments and kept a dynamic product backlog, often revised and adapted based on feedback and updated requirements.

Achievements

A customer app with various booking management features, including checking the route, menus, passenger manifest, service team, flight documents, and aircraft details. For current flights, the live aircraft location and weather at the origin and destination are available and visualized on a map, and a notification system informs users of important updates. Users can also access a dynamic fleet overview for charter bookings (availability, descriptions, pictures, videos, and seat maps, all managed by the client in the CMS).

An employee app for flight crew with route, timetable, and flight documents, all available in in-flight, i.e., offline, mode. A sharing feature lets crew members share relevant flight documents like the passenger count record or supply orders among the team.

Impact

With these apps, the client made significant progress in their ambition to become a fully digital, paperless airline. User experience was the north star during the development, and the feedback from both audiences, airline clients and crew, illustrates that concentrating efforts on good UX pays off.

Technology

The tech stack was a mix of mostly open-source tools:

React Native for cross-platform mobile development.
Strapi.io headless CMS for content management.
Apollo GraphQL for a flexible API layer.
React Native’s AsyncStorage for constant availability in online and offline modes.
FlightAware API and OpenWeather API for live flight coordinates and weather data.

Más Información

PMS Platform Enhancement for Increased Flexibility and Business Growth Creación de Middleware Personalizado para Digitalizar las Operaciones de una Aerolínea