"error": "flight not found" because flight data doesn't match data from OAG

#1

We use the FlightInfoEx endpoint with the ident@departureTime input to find specific flights in order to make subscriptions. This had been working almost 100% for months until May 18 when all of a sudden we started receiving an 80/90% rate of "error": "flight not found".

The departureTime we’ve been using has come from our own periodic OAG imports, but we’ve discovered that OAG and FlightAware data for filed_departuretime is off by exactly 600 seconds in most cases.

Any ideas what’s going on here? Or if this is known already?

#2

Does this trend happen to for specific airlines? Using DAL1394 as an example it appears that filed_departuretime is 600 seconds later than the OAG schedule value.

FlightInfoEX uses filed_departuretime or actualdeparturetime when matching flights. There’s been no recent changes to this behavior.

#3

Thanks for the reply, @dogrock

This trend exists for all airlines we deal with (American, Southwest, United, Delta).

Your reply indicates that you’ve replicated the exact issue we’re encountering. It does not seem to be a behavior change (the fields you mention are the same that we’re using/expecting). The problem is simply that the values differ between OAG and Flight Aware.

We are attempting to make subscriptions before the flight takes off, so actualdeparturetime is not an option for us. We are only able to use the filed departure time obtained by OAG to find specific flights from Flight Aware. If the these values randomly differ by exactly 600 seconds, is there some other method of finding specific flights?

And to re-iterate, these values were almost always the same until May 18/19, when they were suddenly almost always incorrect with the majority being exactly 10 minutes off.

#5

I have filed a ticket regarding your issue. One thing to consider is that you can make the query for only the ident and select the correct flight from the results instead of using ident@departuretime and risk not finding the flight due to being off by 1 second or in your case 600 seconds.

#6

Any update to this? I’m seeing the same issue - a difference of exactly 10 minutes.