FindFlight Historic Data From Current and Previous Days

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

I’m seeking clarification on how FindFlight handles historic data from the current and previous days.

There seems to be conflicting (although possibly outdated) information from Staff on the forums with some posts saying it returns 24 hours of future flights and maybe historic current day flights if some criteria is met; another posts says it should return flights from the previous, current, and next day (which is similar to the answer here which says +/- 1 day).

In my experience, I almost always see historical data from the current day but almost never from the previous day. An exception is when I query from KJFK to KLAX - and then I see results going back to Saturday (currently it is Wednesday)!

I’m using 'howMany': 150 on a silver plan, and I don’t usually hit the cap except in that KJFK to KLAX example.

So, are historic results intended to only be for current day flights, or should I also expect flights from the previous day, or is another explanation?

Thanks in advance.

2

You should avoid assuming that there is a specific fixed timeframe that is being returned, since there is significant fuzziness in the heuristics of what flights are returned by FindFlight.

The current behavior for the non-stop flights it returns are approximately flights with filed_departuretime that is 7 days in the past to 24 hours in the future, with a limit of 3 flights for the same ident. (For flights that operate once per day, this is generally going to get you tomorrow, today, and yesterday’s flight. For less frequent flights, you might see flights that are more than one day old.)

1 Like
3

Thank you for clarifying.