We registered for an event on June 30th. We received the arrival event for the flight and not the departure event. Can you please let me know why we did not receive a departure event on this flight or if there is something wrong with the registration. Attached the JSON for the alert_id we had subscribed. Here is the payload from GetAlerts endpoint
{
“alert_id”: 34698135,
“enabled”: true,
“description”: “Emirates 9834 (DXB / OMDB → COK / VOCI)”,
“type”: “Form_Airline”,
“ident”: “UAE9834”,
“user_ident”: “”,
“aircrafttype”: “”,
“origin”: “OMDB”,
“destination”: “VOCI”,
“date_start”: 1593475200,
“date_end”: 1593475200,
“channels”: [
{
“channel_id”: 16,
“channel_name”: “FlightXML push”,
“mask_summary”: “”,
“e_filed”: false,
“e_departure”: true,
“e_arrival”: true,
“e_diverted”: true,
“e_cancelled”: true,
“target_address”: “Craneww”
}
],
“alert_created”: 1593395464,
“alert_changed”: 1593395464
}
It looks like the recent flight of UAE9834 was initially tracked as a position-only flight. This means at the time of departure the intended destination was not known by FlightAware so it could not be matched to the alert criteria since it included a destination. However, the destination was known at arrival time and the arrival alert could be sent.
To avoid this the destination could be excluded from your alert in case the next flight is also departed as position-only.
Is there a way to know if the flights are position-only to not register them with destination? Are there any required fields when setting an alert? Everything on the documentation is optional. We use flight aware API’s only to track a specific flight and from specific origin and destination for our use case.
Does it mean that if we register with only flight number (ident) with start and end dates, is sufficient to get alerts?
Unfortunately the nature of position-only flights is that they aren’t known in advance. However, in the general case is is uncommon that commercial passenger operations will be tracked as position only flights.
SetAlert needs to have a valid channels value. The ident, origin, destination and aircrafttype parameters are are handled as a logical AND if they are provided. In this specific case using just the flight number would likely work since Emirates tends to use a single flight number for a given route.