I have been using Flight Aware’s API in order to get the location of specific aircrafts in the U.S.
unfortunately, i have encountered some instances where the method i’m using (SearchBirdseyeInFlight) returns the wrong aircraft location, while GetLastTrack returns the correct location (according to your site) but with much less details than the search does (details which i’m currently using, such as origin & destination airports).
Also, SearchBirdseyeInFlight allows me to search multiple aircraft using a single request, while GetLastTrack can only handle one ident at a time.
Example: N351EF
SearchBirdseyeInFlight puts it at 21.03653, -86.87708
While GetLastTrack returns a lot of coordinates, and the last one points to 34.749, -83.817
Is there a reason why SearchBirdseyeInFlight doesn’t return the correct location of the aircraft?
Is there another method i can use in order to get the correct data for multiple aircrafts?
Your SearchBirdseyeInFlight call returned a different flight than the GetLastTrack call did.
The flight was from March 15th, with “21.017 -86.867” has origin":“KMQS”,“destination”:“MMUN”, and “faFlightID”:“N351EF-1458055374-0-0”
We are investigating why this happened, for some reason this flight is better identified by the registration number than by ident.
In the meantime a call to SearchBirdseyeInFlight with {ident_or_reg N351EF} will return data for the last flight. However, a search with ident_or_reg will be slower, it is not recommended usually but may be a good temporary solution for you.
I see the inconsistent behavior of the call for ident N31GJ. I do get the most current flight most of the times but sometimes after several calls I get the previous flight, probably from a server that was not updated yet for that flight.
I don’t have any suggestion or solution, SearchBirdseyeInFlight and GetLastTrack are the calls that should provide you with position data. I know the team is working on improving the api calls. Maybe someone else has other advice for you.
