AircraftBoards: Request flights from a specific timeframe

I want to find all flights in/out of an airport during a given timeframe, for example 5am to 12pm yesterday. How can I specify the timeframe in the AircraftBoards query? Can I do this using “offset” input? The documentation only says that “offset” is an integer and optional but I’m guessing at it’s meaning. I tried offset=120, hoping to get flights from 2 hours ago and it appears to be working (sort of)

Another option is to pull all flights in the FlightAware database and then filter. I’m concerned that the “max results” limit will prevent me from getting the specific data I need in that scenario. That could also be a concern if I need all flights occurring during a long timeframe (i.e. 24 or 48 hours) as I can easily see more than 150 (Platinum limit) flights in/out a busy airport in two days.

Any suggestions?

Offset would be from the last set of results, meaning if you pulled 100 results, your next set of 100 results would have an offset of 101 - 200 and so on.

I think OP is misunderstanding what the 150 limit is - that’s just the number of results in a single request - you can make many requests each day.

In order to cover a date range, just keep making requests with increasing offsets until you’ve retrieved a flight beyond the window you’re looking for (for example, you might have to make the request with an offset of 150, 300, 450, and 600 to get all of them).

Given how FlightAware charges in blocks of 15, it’s most prudent to fetch records 15 at a time and increase your offset accordingly, that way you don’t end up paying for too many flights you don’t need (offset 15, 30, 45, etc.).

Going from how it works already, to what’d be nice insofar as feature requests go - being able to fetch all flights for a certain window of time would be a really nice feature.