We’ve just finished making some exciting new improvements to FlightXML2! One of the most frequently requested feature in the last few months has been to support searching for aircraft that are operating under a codeshare agreement. (For example, the Continental flight COA2139 is actually flies under BTA2139 and you would find no results if you previously tried to use FlightXML to search for COA2139.)
Your existing FlightXML applications will now be able to find codeshare and alternate idents without any changes to your application code. It happens automatically if the requested ident cannot be found as it was supplied to any of these existing FlightXML2 functions:
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FlightInfo
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FlightInfoEx
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InFlightInfo
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GetLastTrack
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GetFlightID
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TailOwner
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MapFlight
In particular, the following FlightXML2 functions DO NOT support automatic codeshare/alternate ident lookups, however we hope to also update the Search and SearchBirdseyeInFlight in the near future (once we complete some other backend infrastructure updates first):
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FleetScheduled – the fleet argument
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FleetArrived – the fleet argument
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Search – expressions using the -idents clause
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SearchBirdseyeInFlight – expressions involving the ident column
Additionally, we’ve added a new function to FlightXML2 called AirlineFlightInfo that lets you look up some interesting information about commercial airline flights. For example, you can find the departing terminal/gate, arriving terminal/gate, baggage claim, how many seats in first/business/coach class, and whether meal service is provided/available. If the flight operates as any other identities because of codeshare agreements the list of all of those idents is returned in an array. Finally, this function also includes the tail number (registration) of the aircraft serving that airline flight if we know it. Some or all of these fields may be blank for some airline flights, however. You can check out the documentation for this new “class 2” function here: http://flightxml.flightaware.com/soap/FlightXML2/doc#op_AirlineFlightInfo
The FlightXML2 WSDL has been updated to include the new AirlineFlightInfo function. If you would like to take advantage of this new function you may need to re-download the WSDL and/or rebuild the function stubs if your language/framework uses static SOAP generation.
All of these changes have been made only to FlightXML2. If you are still using FlightXML1 and want to take advantage of this new functionality, this may be a great reason to upgrade.
Let me know if you have any feedback or encounter any problems!