That's a good point -- Google's crawlers won't grab anything if it's served by AJAX, but hopefully any important keywords or information will be static HTML anyway, and will be indexed by Google. That being said, your approach seems to mirror statusmatcher.com, which does a great job of appearing in the Google search results if I search, say, "Airline X to Airline Y status match".

Yeah, I went with OpenFlights for my data and it was pretty limited -- I compiled a few Mongo docs / JSON with some data from it: https://github.com/Jamil/metal/tree/master/data/json (ignore fare_class.json -- it was an experiment and I failed where you succeeded :P). I love the idea of crowdsourcing the data, which works really effectively especially with a helpful and active community like FT

With regard to bandwidth, I'd suggest using an Amazon EC2 instance, which is part of the phenomenal Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's basically like your own personal server, with unlimited bandwidth -- the least powerful instance (still plenty to serve a web app) is free for a year, and something like $30/yr afterwards. They're offering free credit of $100 too, just PM me and I'll send you the link (and if you just want to chat some more about the web app!)


EDIT: One thing I did get done on my API was the mileage distance calculator. OpenFlights did have enough information for that….just need the lat/long and then use the Haversine formula. Try, say, http://crosswind.io/api/distance?airports=YYZ,MIA,PTY