Hi I wonder if anyone can help me with a data issue.
I am using Node-RED and accessing the http data via a command http://local_ip_address:8080/data/aircraft.json, which gives me access to the received JSON file.
I can parse the data, which is great except there is no information re the origin or the destination airports within the arrays. I can access similar data via a competitor, which has this extra origin and destination airports, but I don’t want to use that as it does not sync well with the data I receive myself.
To elaborate, aircraft.json doesn’t include origin/destination because ADS-B does not transmit origin/destination information. You’ll need to fuse the data you receive locally with a separate non-ADS-B datasource of some sort – AeroAPI will do this for you as Eric suggests, this type of data fusion is exactly what FlightAware does all the time.
Alternatively I know some applications e.g. VRS attempt to provide origin/destination based on a database of known callsigns/idents, but that has a number of challenges (how do you keep that database up to date; it doesn’t work with irregular or unscheduled flights; it doesn’t work with flights that maintain the same callsign for multiple stops)
So, I assume you are talking about when for example you click “View Flight Page” on the SkyAware page, you can view the origin and destination of the flight? This seems to work well for scheduled airlines. However it can occasionally come up with strange results for military planes (for example “this plane landed a month ago”, at the other end of the country – when you just clicked on it on your local map.
Also, looking at AeroAPI, I didn’t realize that you have a limited number of times you can click that button per month, and also it’s rate limited, if I understand the AeroAPI charges.
Military flights tend to be tricky for a variety of reasons - callsigns don’t follow the usual ICAO prefix + flight number format; we don’t generally have registration data for them; and they are often not present in data feeds from ANSPs. We tend to be cautious about creating flights from that sort of data.
You mean the “view flight page” button? There’s no limit on that (well, beyond the general “don’t scrape the website” limitation). AeroAPI is a separate API.
The reason for my question is that I have a small project, which includes the flight data for aircraft within sight/distance parmeters from my location. This is displayed on a page in my Home Assistant and I am using Node-RED to to calculate distances, azimuth, elevation and other data, to create the entities.
It’s all working well but I just wanted to tidy it up using only one source. I see that is not entirely possible so I wil just leave it alone on the premise, it’s not broke so don’t fix it.
