About Airport Sprint
Claim your airport
The first accepted, verified public trip at each airport earns its traveler a permanent Founding Traveler badge. The badge stays as rankings change, including if the founding post is removed. Deleting a profile removes the traveler’s identity; the airport stays claimed. Existing verified trips receive recognition in their original submission order.
Demo scores are fictional and separate from all live rankings, comparisons, and founding awards.
Friends comparing their quickest trips from home to the boarding gate. No prizes. Just bragging rights.
Install the app to add your score
The iPhone app isn’t available to install yet. It’s still in development; an App Store or TestFlight link will appear here when it’s ready. Here’s how posting works in the app:
- Start your sprint. Allow GPS and start the timer when you leave home. Add your flight number and departure date before or during the trip.
- Mark both stops. Tap when you reach the airport terminal, then when you reach your boarding gate. A matched flight is required before sharing. Parking and shuttle time belong in the first leg.
- Made the flight? Post your time. Choose Post to leaderboard after your trip. Pick a username; an avatar, a short public bio, and Twitter / X, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile links are optional. Only eligible trips with GPS, a matched flight, and recorded gate timing can join.
To qualify, your recorded gate tap must be at least 10 minutes before the looked-up scheduled departure. Trips that don’t qualify stay in your private phone history. Sharing a score image to social apps doesn’t need a public username.
This started with friends comparing their quickest trips to the gate. No prizes involved. Airport averages include travel from home, so this is friendly competition, not a scientific ranking of airports.
The rules
The clock starts when you leave your front door. Leg one ends when you arrive at the airport terminal—after parking or a shuttle, if you use one. Leg two ends when you reach your boarding gate. Only trips where you made your commercial flight belong on the board.
All public trips meet the same GPS and flight-timing requirements. Historical manual entries cannot join the boards. Individual trips are ranked by the selected leg or total. Airports are ranked by the arithmetic mean of all submitted trips for that airport and the selected category. Travelers are ranked by their arithmetic mean across every eligible trip matching the airport and trip-type filters. The minimum-trip filter applies to both traveler and airport averages, not individual trips. Equal times share a rank. Averages are ranked before rounding for display.
Every public score requires a recorded gate-arrival tap at least 10 minutes before the automatically looked-up scheduled departure time, with GPS matching that airport. Trips missing this evidence stay in private phone history. Flight numbers and private routes are never shown publicly. Flight lookup sends the flight number and date to FlightAware AeroAPI; GPS stays on the phone.
Most last minute ranks people by their average time between recorded gate arrival and boarding deadline, across eligible posted trips at the selected airport, or all airports when that filter is selected. The airport ranking averages boarding buffers across every eligible trip at each airport. The minimum-trip filter applies to both Most last minute traveler and airport averages, with 3+ eligible trips by default. The trip-type filter does not affect either ranking. Deadlines use confirmed operating-airline policies where available, otherwise 10 minutes before scheduled departure. Arrivals after that deadline are excluded from this board. These are estimated deadlines, not actual door-closure timestamps.
These are friendly competition results. Home location and travel choices affect comparisons. Home location, security lines, bags, and a small sample all affect the result.
Privacy
A public leaderboard submission sends your username, optional avatar, airport inferred from the matched flight, two durations, and random trip ID. Flight lookup sends a flight number and departure date through our server to FlightAware AeroAPI. Verification checks the recorded gate-tap time against an encrypted receipt of the provider’s scheduled departure. These flight details and precise timestamps are processed for the check and are not saved in the application database. We store the badge, an automatically calculated duration before the boarding deadline, a request hash for retries, the sharing day, and daily upload/lookup counts. A random private key identifies your phone; its hash is stored on the server. GPS coordinates, routes, home addresses, email, real names, advertising IDs, and hardware identifiers are never sent.
Trip recording requires GPS with iOS permission, and runs only during an ongoing trip. It suggests nearby airports and saves a private route on your iPhone in protected storage excluded from backups. Recording stops at the gate, when a trip is discarded, when location permission is removed, or at the 12-hour limit. You can view and delete saved routes in the app; they do not sync to the server. The Lock Screen timer contains no coordinates.
Your username, optional avatar, optional bio and social links, airport, trip durations, and eligible time before the boarding deadline are public. Player profiles show the home airport chosen by the traveler, completed public trip counts, average door-to-gate duration, average boarding buffer, personal best, latest trip, and an airport personality. Home airport is optional and is never inferred from travel history. Stats and trip highlights use only verified public trips. Personal best is the fastest total door-to-gate trip; latest is the most recently posted trip, using sharing day and submission order. Boarding averages use nonnegative buffers before an estimated boarding deadline, not actual gate closure. Personality requires at least 3 eligible buffers, with two thirds of the latest 10 in one category. Only the avatar, bio, and Twitter / X, Instagram, or LinkedIn links you choose to add appear. You can edit or clear those optional details in the app. Social links open the network you choose in a new tab; no social login is required. Avatars are resized and image metadata is removed. Username-free score images are generated on your iPhone and shared only through the destination you choose; this does not post to our leaderboard. A private device session enables flight lookup before a public username is chosen. Your private key stays in the phone’s Keychain. You can delete individual trips or all your server data in the app. If you set up optional phone recovery, a verified number can restore your server account and revoke the old phone’s access. It cannot restore private routes or exact trip history from a lost phone. Without a device key or access to a verified recovery number, we cannot promise to restore access. Recovery numbers are private, stored encrypted with a keyed lookup hash, and used only for account verification and recovery. Twilio Verify processes numbers and the codes you request. Codes expire after ten minutes; expired temporary verification records are pruned on the next recovery request or check. Removing the recovery method or deleting the account removes its association and pending challenges. Short-lived abuse counters use keyed digests of numbers, credentials and IP addresses.
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