FlightInfoEx: Incorrect departure time

Hi there,
Following upon an earlier post here, I confirm that FlightInfoEx is returning an incorrect ‘filed_departuretime’, when a flight has NOT departed yet.

  • When a flight is yet to depart, the ‘filed_departuretime’ is the only field that has departure time. ‘actualdeparturetime’ is 0, since the flight has not departed yet.

  • When an airline announces a delay, your website shows the delayed (new) time. However, ‘filed_departuretime’ continues to return the original time and NOT the delayed time.

  • There is no other field that reflects this delay.

So how is it that your website shows the correct (delayed) time, but the API returns the wrong (originally scheduled) departure time?
When can we expect this to be fixed?

filed_departuretime is the time on their IFR flightplan, and is not updated in the event of a delay. To get an estimate of the expected delay you would need to compare estimatedarrival time with filed_departuretime + filed_ete.

In FlightXML3 however we do expose a filed_departuretime, estimated_departuretime and actual_departuretime so if you use the FlightInfoStatus method in FlightXML3 it’s easier to tell when a flight is delayed and by how much.