Add real departure time in XML

We are using SEARCH_BIRDSEYE_IN_FLIGHT to get all flights with specific aircraft from specific airline. Works pretty good but the problem when the flight is delayed, we dont have anyway to check the actual departure time using this XML. ir oder to do that we have to extract another base that become expensive and counter productive.
I can see that flight aware has the actual departure time in the webpage.

SearchBirdseyeInFlight returns an InFlightAircraftStruct structure that has arrivalTime and departureTime elements. If the flight has not yet arrived or departed, then that time field should be 0.

Additionally, you can use the faFlightID element from that structure to call the FlightInfoEx function for more details about that particular flight.

Dear Bovineone, I know we can use many different calls to get the information we need, but doesn’t seem logical or productive to have to extract multiple APis in order to get the data we need, specially on costs per call. As i described in my topic, its how to avoid multiple calls to get simple field in a actual call that has already schedule departure time, actual arrival time and even first position time. why not add actual departure.

The different APIs are structured that way because they are accessing different internal backend interfaces on our server side, which each have different data available. There are no plans to alter the data fields returned by current FlightXML2 methods because that API is considered in production and frozen at this time. (However, FlightXML3 beta may still potentially undergo changes to the structures that have already been defined before it is released to production.)

Depending on the needs of your application, you may be able to use pushed alerts with SetAlert to receive a callback when a flight is filed, departs, or arrives. Your endpoint can then trigger other activities, including polling for additional data.

You might want to also consider changing your polling interval based on how close the current time is to the expected departure time. If a flight is still scheduled to depart several hours in the future, then you may not want to poll as frequently as when the flight is only minutes from departure.

FlightXML3 introduces some additional fields, such as estimated_departure_time, which will frequently be updated with a revised time if a flight is experiencing a delay and has not yet departed.