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Why doing it only for flights departing PHL instead of generalizing the system to other airports?

It just takes too much time and effort to keep it up for multiple audiences. It’s not automated — it’s all about the curation. There are plenty of similar sites that cover many more airports though

I'm sure it could easily be automated with Python/Django and periodic scraping tasks and then ramped up for the rest of the US.

You must work with clean data sources. :)

This is the naive approach you would do 15+ years ago.

Then things got way better with real browser engines like Webkit that could understand Javascript. That was something that I've personally hacked together as a contractor for an anti-piracy customer using Python, Webkit and Qt framework (PyQt) in around 2009. Shortly after some nice libraries in node/js came out like Phantom.js which would make this much better.

If I were to do this today, I'd use Playwright.

they're leaving room for the rest of us ;)

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