I am looking to get something similar to airport departure/arrival boards. From other APIs you’d simply pass in the airport code and whether you wanted departures or arrivals and it’d give you a list which resembles an airport departure board - eg. for departures it’d show flights which have just departed as well as ones which are still scheduled.
For arrivals, it would show flights which have just arrived, ones which are still on-route and also ones which are still scheduled at the origin airport.
My question is, how can I achieve this with FlightAware? There must be a simple way of doing this - if I want arriving flights into an airport I assume there’s something more simple than having to make separate requests for Arrived, EnRoute and Scheduled.
Furthermore, how is it possible to work out whether a flight is currently on-time or is being delayed from a ScheduledFlightStruct? I can see an “estimatedarrivaltime” but no scheduled arrival time, so there’s nothing to compare it to. Likewise, there’s a “filed_departuretime” but no estimated departure time.
Thanks for your help. I’d really like to use the FlightXML API.
Jake
The 4 functions Arrived, Enroute, Scheduled, and Departed can be used to obtain the flights involving that airport. If necessary, you can use FlightInfoEx and AirlineFlightInfo to retrieve more details about any individual flight that those 4 functions indicated.
The scheduled arrival time can be computed by (filed_departuretime + filed_ete), however you will need to make an additional call to FlightInfoEx (with “ident@filed_departuretime”) to obtain the filed_ete. I recommend that you cache the static details from FlightInfoEx, like filed_ete, so that you do not need to fetch that value every time your data from Scheduled is refreshed.
So in order to replicate an airport’s arrival board there’d need to be 4 calls for Arrived, Enroute, Scheduled and Departed and then an additional call for each flight so the scheduled arrival time can be calculated to work out potential delays.
For a volume of 10k - 25k queries and assuming that I show 30 flights on the arrival board to the user, this would mean it would cost me $0.16 for that, which is very high considering I wouldn’t need most of the data it’d return and also $0.16 is for 1 airport at 1 moment in time, considering how often it’d need to be refreshed to stay up-to-date it could easily get up to $1 within 10 minutes.
How likely is it that the API become more flexible to account for things like this in the future? It’s pretty great that things like Scheduled flights can be found separately, but really it’d be much more useful for basic use-cases to just be able to get information that users are more interested in, like departures or arrival boards.
I’ll wait in hope that FlightXML 3 solves this issue so I can begin using FlightAware, it isn’t commercially-viable for me right now. Really appreciate the quick responses though.
If you are wanting to create an airport situational display, you might consider investigating our FlightAware TV product: flightaware.com/commercial/tv/
