I worked for an organization that manages multiple airports. We are looking into building a dashboards with flight data that would help our airports improve/minimize surface congestion and generally improve passenger experience by providing better passenger communication.
Some of the major factors that would impact surface congestion would be flight delayed, flight canceled and potentially diverted flights.
We are looking into the FlightXML Version 3.0 for the AirportBoards API. It seems that this API would provide us with the data we need but I would like to have a better understanding of the API response. I found very little documentation on the API response. This API return a TrackAirportStruct structure for Arrivals, Departures, Enroute and schedule. Can you help with the following questions:
Do you have detail information/documentation on the TrackAirportStruct ?
If I make a call to the AirportBoards API what is the difference between Schedule, Arrival, Departure and enroute structure?
Is the schedule data for the current day? What is the timeframe of the data, is it for the next 24 hours?
If I make an AirportBoards API call each hours, what should I expect in term of data being updated? Do I get only new data or all data can also be updated. If a flight that was schedule and an hours later is being cancelled or delayed, the fact that that flight is being cancelled or delayed is it still in the schedule data?
Sorry, is it a lot of simple and possibly obvious questions but we are just starting with Flight Aware API.
Thank you for your help.
Unfortunately the version of the documentation you were looking at doesn’t handle nested structures well currently. However, all functions and structures are also documented on this alternative format, which does list all of the structures separately near the bottom: FlightXML3 Web Services
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Scheduled are scheduled flights to depart from the specified airport and a maximum number of flights to be returned. Scheduled flights are returned from soonest to furthest in the future to depart. Only flights that have not actually departed, and have a scheduled departure time between 2 hours in the past and 24 hours in the future, are considered.
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Arrived are flights that have recently arrived for the specified airport and maximum number of flights to be returned. Flights are returned from most to least recent. Only flights that arrived within the last 24 hours are considered.
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Departed are already departed flights from a specified airport and maximum number of flights to be returned. Departed flights are returned in order from most recently to least recently departed. Only flights that have departed within the last 24 hours are considered.
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Enroute are flights already in the air heading towards the specified airport and also flights scheduled to arrive at the specified airport. Enroute flights are returned from soonest estimated arrival to least soon estimated arrival.
I am looking at the AirportBoards API. The goal is to get all flights for that day (for a specific airport, using the AirportBoards API where type = scheduled) and get updated information on all the flights that are scheduled for that day (using the AiportBoards API where type would be either arrivals, departures or enroute).
First question is, is this the right API. If it is, is the field faFlightID the field to use to link the scheduled flights with the updated flight information from the arrivals, departure and enroute data?
