flight-tracker - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: flight-tracker description: Track flight status and get FlightAware links. Use when asked about flights, flight status, arrival times, or flight tracking. Trigger words - flight, flying, UA, AA, DL, landing, arriving, departure.

Flight Tracker

Track flights and get accurate FlightAware links.

Usage

uv run ~/.claude/skills/flight-tracker/scripts/track.py UA1372
uv run ~/.claude/skills/flight-tracker/scripts/track.py "UA 1372"
uv run ~/.claude/skills/flight-tracker/scripts/track.py DL405 --date 2026-01-30
uv run ~/.claude/skills/flight-tracker/scripts/track.py UA1372 --json
uv run ~/.claude/skills/flight-tracker/scripts/track.py UA1372 --all   # show all dates, not just today

The script will:

Fetch flight data from FlightAware (single HTTP GET, no API key needed)
Parse the embedded trackpollBootstrap JSON from the page
Filter to today's segments and output status, gates, times, and FlightAware URLs

How It Works

FlightAware embeds all flight data as JSON in a trackpollBootstrap JavaScript variable on the page. The script fetches the HTML with a simple requests.get(), parses out the JSON with raw_decode, and extracts structured data including:

Origin/destination airports (ICAO + IATA codes)
Scheduled, estimated, and actual departure/arrival times (unix timestamps)
Flight status (airborne, arrived, scheduled, etc.)
Gate and terminal info
Permalink URLs for each segment

No Chrome or API key required.

Airline ICAO Codes

IATA	ICAO	Airline
UA	UAL	United Airlines
AA	AAL	American Airlines
DL	DAL	Delta Air Lines
WN	SWA	Southwest Airlines
B6	JBU	JetBlue Airways
AS	ASA	Alaska Airlines
NK	NKS	Spirit Airlines
F9	FFT	Frontier Airlines
HA	HAL	Hawaiian Airlines

Important Notes

Multi-segment flights (e.g., SEA→SFO→BOS) have separate FlightAware pages per segment
When someone says "my flight," find ALL segments and report on each
NEVER truncate URLs when sharing over SMS. Always send the full FlightAware URL so it's clickable.
The --json flag outputs structured data for programmatic use
Times are DST-aware using zoneinfo (e.g., America/Los_Angeles, America/New_York). Never use hardcoded UTC offset arithmetic — use proper timezone objects so times automatically shift during DST transitions.
Cross-check times before sharing publicly. Verify displayed time against raw unix timestamps in --json output before posting in group chats or SMS. DST edge cases can cause displayed times to be off by 1 hour. To verify: run with --json and confirm the human-readable time matches datetime.fromtimestamp(unix_ts, tz=timezone) for the destination airport's timezone.