Hello and thanks in advance for helping,
I need to map the fleet of specific operators. To minimize requesting info from the same aircraft multiple times, I 'm using the tailnumber as unique identifier. Nevertheless, this field has a high percent of chance to not be available when using FlightXML2 FleetArrived/FleetScheduled or FlightXML3 FleetBoards. In the other hand, the faFlightID field is always available but I don’t know if the same aircraft may have multiples faFlightID. Moreover, is there a better field to look for to map each aircraft from given operator?
Thanks again
There will definitely be multiple faFlightID values mapping to each tail number (or each ident), since the faFlightID represents a unique flight on a specific date/time.
If you are comparing results from multiple calls of FleetArrived/FleetScheduled, you will likely find an aircraft that just arrived will soon be scheduled to operate another flight outbound and will thus have a different faFlightID for that outbound flight.
Unfortunately we do not always have access to the aircraft registration (ie: tail number) for some airlines, so it won’t always be possible to know that an inbound flight will be operating the corresponding outbound flight.
