Feature: Always return a fa_flight_id on scheduled flight response

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hello

(sorry, second issue of the day)

I have searched the forum to try and find an open thread for this integration problem - When searching via the scheduled endpoint we are likely to get no fa_flight_id for flights further away than a couple of days.

This leads to repeated excess calls until we see you have generated an ID, and then we can query the actual flight details endpoint as it contains more information than this one… My questions would be:

  1. Why do you not expose an ID for these flights you’ve ingested (Do you not have one internally?)
  2. What is the rule for knowing when a flight will have an ID assigned to it?
  3. In the company’s eyes, is this a problem you’re looking to tackle at all, or classed as infeasible?

Thanks

2

fa_flight_ids are only generated when we internally start tracking the flight, which is generally about 48 hours prior to scheduled block off (gate departure) time. This threshold is also when the flight begins to be shown on our website as an upcoming flight.

Prior to that point, we may only have rough scheduled timetable information, which are published by airlines spanning months in advance, but we are not actively tracking any information about the flight yet.

There are no current plans to change this technical implementation, since that threshold is closely aligned with when the earliest we begin to start receiving actual tracking information from our upstream data providers.