vibrant-jewel

United Kingdom

Registered

September 1, 2026

Description and Rationale

Outside work I’m a licensed amateur radio operator (2D0PEY), and most of my projects sit where RF, hardware and data meet. I receive ADS-B at home and built NearestPlane, an ESP32-driven display showing the closest aircraft overhead in real time. I also run a couple of small public data tools of my own, so I’m used to shipping something at the end rather than leaving it in a notebook.

Taxi-out time appealed to me because it’s a genuinely operational problem rather than a synthetic one. The interesting part isn’t the model, it’s the framing: taxi-out is largely a question of how congested the airfield is at the moment a flight goes off-block, so the work sits in representing queue state, traffic in the surrounding window, runway configuration and stand geometry. That’s a much more interesting problem than it first looks.

I registered because the combination of open data, a clearly defined target and a public leaderboard is the best possible way to test whether my intuitions about the problem actually hold up. I’m also committed to the open solutions side. Whatever I produce will go up as a documented public repository, whether or not it finishes anywhere near the top.

Details

  • Type: Independent
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Number of team members: 1
ID Forename Surname Affiliation
1 Gavin Wilby Independent