Arrivals / Departures with Airline Names

I am trying to build a Arrivals / Departures app for our local airport using your API but am having a hard time figuring out a way to get the information I need.

Their existing application for this can be seen here.
golws.com/airlineSchedules.html

I’ve seen the Scheduled end point and that has virtually everything I need for departures except the airline names.

I’ve seen Arrived / Enroute

I’ve also been looking at AirlineFlightSchedules as it seems that would largely work for what I need if I leave the airline portion blank.

I can’t seem to find an endpoint that will give me airline names that I need with the other information I need.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So it looks like I figured out a way to get the information I need from AirlineFlightSchedules. My question is how often is this information updated and would it work for an accurate arrivals/departures application?

For the commercial flights in and out of your airport, you can use airlineFlightSchedules to obtain the scheduled inbound:

flightxml.flightaware.com/json/F … 1490204327

and scheduled outbound flights:

flightxml.flightaware.com/json/F … 1490204327

(I’ve picked start and end dates to cover the next 24 hours)

You’ll get an actual_ident for each flight and the first three characters of that ident will be the airline code. You can use AirlineInfo to get the name of the airline:

flightxml.flightaware.com/json/F … neCode=QXE

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. That is exactly what I discovered on my own looking over the data here.
How often is this updated and would it be accurate for arrivals / departures for an airport?

Sorry I sort of misunderstood your application.

The AirlineFlightScheduled information is updated once a month so it may not be ideal for what you are doing. It’s really more useful for flights that are > 48h in the future.

If you want to see flights going in and out of an airport in a more “live” way, then Scheduled/Enroute/Departed/Arrived will give you a better picture of current operations at an airport. You can filter each one of those for just airline or ga flights. You can then query FlightInfoEx using ident@departuretime to get more granular information on a specific flight. If a plane has departed then you can determine any delay by comparing the filed_departuretime with the actualdeparturetime. If the plane has not yet departed then you can compare filed_departuretime + filed_ete with estimatedarrivaltime to calculate any delays. We’re going to add scheduled and estimated gate times for both origin and destination in flightxml3 which will make that easier to obtain.

When if flightxml3 supposed to be released?

It’ll be in beta in the first part of April and anticipated to be in Production near the beginning of June.

So going this route with scheduled/arrivals/departures/en route what is the easiest way to get the airline name?

Essentially this is a really small airport and talking to people they only have 2 airlines that really fly in and out. Which is Alaska Airlines and Delta Airlines. They don’t have a huge budget to spend thousands pulling this information every year. I am not seeing a way to filter by a particular airline. I tried to filter the arrival data by ‘Airline’ and am still getting way more flights than they have coming in.

I really need a way to identify the airlines of these flights so that I can filter the others out and only show the flights that need to be shown.

Thanks in advance.

Is there a way to sort or show airline for these flights?

AirlineFlightSchedules will let you filter by airline. You could make calls to AirlineFlightSchedules periodically (perhaps once a week or two. we generally receive and publish updated on the first Friday of the month) with origin KLWS and then the ICAO codes for the airlines that fly into the airport (ie DAL for Delta). Also calls with destination KLWS and the airline ICAO codes. However you may still get some duplicate results because of code shared. If you look at the actual_ident you should be able to detect any duplicates and remove them or group them together depending on how you want to handle that.

You’d then have a list of scheduled flights for the month (I’m assuming you set a startdate of now and enddate a month from now - you can look out a year with that method). Then at the beginning of the day make a call to FlightInfoEx for the scheduled flights passing in the ‘actual_ident’ from AirlineFlightSchedules. If you just want information on that specific flight from FlightInfoEx then you’ll need to specify the ident@epoch. That could potentially be an economical solution for getting the data you need. If you want information during the day on the status of those flights you can call FlightInfoEx at some interval to get updated information.

We really need a more live solution than something that is only updated once a month. I see that your own website doesn’t really seem to have Airlines listed in the live feed and am thinking it will be impossible for me to have the airline names in my application with the way it seems to be structured. As there is no real way to discern with the 4 live end points I would be using.

I could build the application with the scheduled/arrivals/departures/enroute endpoints if I could do it without the airline name. It would still cost like 4x more for the queries than we had anticipated due to having to query 4 endpoints to get the information we need instead of just one.

So we are considering just waiting to do this until the new version of your API comes out. I am hoping that the new version of the API will have an easier structure to query this arrival / departure information including a way to get the airline name without doing an overabundance of queries.

Can you answer some questions about the new API? Like will it have a more conducive structure to allow for this type of application without doing an overabundance of queries?

Thanks in advance.