Just twit your flight number (eg. AA984) to @isit737MAX and a bot will reply with the actual aircraft type you're flying. Try it here!

I'm an avgeek, and as such, I was very curious about the recent news about the 737 MAX. Investigation is still underway but there's a good article from the New York times about it. What You Need to Know After Deadly Boeing 737 Max Crashes.

Every 737 MAX was grounded waiting for "the fix", so I thought I could create something to let people know if they're flying a 737 MAX or not. Why?, because I could, and because it would be a fun experiment. And that's it!.

So I created a new twiiter handle called isit737MAX, which, when you tweet a flight number to it, it will reply letting you know if you're flying a 737 MAX or not.

The code here it's been deployed to an Azure Function, which is the one sending out the twits. But who is calling that function, how do I know who to reply to and what to reply.

I used to implement that part with a Microsoft Flow, I then moved it to an Azure Logic app and it even worked for a while with an IFTTT applet. The problem with those integrations is that they were all pulling data from the twitter API asking for mentions. They obviously have a windows in which they work. The Azure Logic app pulled every 5 minutes, and the IFTTT applet once every hour. So I needed/wanted something faster. That's how I discovered Twitter's Account Activity API which allows you to setup a webhook from an account to your endpoint.

So right now I have a small app (not in this repo) that using the TwitterLib creates a webhook and a subscription for the @IsIt737MAX twitter handle. The urls for that webhook is my Azure function, so now every time somebody mentions* @IsIt737MAX on a twit, the function get called. The function process the twit and send out a reply to the twit with the actual aircraft that's being used for the mentioned flight.

Give it a try, twit any flight number and let @IsIt737MAX let you know if you're flying in a 737 MAX.

And let me know what you think.