Flight in persistent state of 'Taxiing / Left Gate'

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hello everyone, first time here,

I’m trying to match tail and flight numbers as early as possible in an airlines delivery of their flying schedule. I’m using FlightXML 3.0

My best attempt so far uses the FleetBoards

Get the schedule for the day - loop iterate it until we start bringing back tomorrows data
payload = {‘fleet_code’: ‘BEE’, ‘type’: ‘scheduled’, ‘include_ex_data’: ‘true’, ‘offset’: next_offset}

Now we know the flights the airline will use - periodically pull back departures and arrivals
payload = {‘fleet_code’: ‘BEE’, ‘type’: ‘departures’, ‘include_ex_data’: ‘true’, ‘offset’: next_offset}
payload = {‘fleet_code’: ‘BEE’, ‘type’: ‘arrivals’, ‘include_ex_data’: ‘true’, ‘offset’: next_offset}

The departure and arrival data has the tail number (and a bunch of other useful information) - so I now have the information I need.

The problem comes when a flight stays in the state of ‘Taxiing / Left Gate’. In the FlightAware web interface, this seems to be ‘TAXIING FOR TAKEOFF’

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In this example, the flight has been taxiing for 2 hours 23m. The flight is not coming back in the departures or arrivals query, and so I can’t (with my current knowledge/technique) obtain the tail number.

2 main questions:
What causes this behaviour and is it surmountable?
Is there another way to match tail to flight numbers in a near real-time?

Thanks - Ben

2

This appears to be a call sign disambiguation miss. The ticketed flight is BEE3231, but it operates under call-sign BEE2701N. Unfortunately all events after the taxi out were associated with the latter call sign and the former was eventually cancelled in system due to lack if in-air positions.

This call sign relationship has already been resolved as seen by today’s instance of the flight:
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/BEE270N/history/20191028/1425Z/EGCC/LFLL

Additionally if you have a tail that is not appearing in the FleetBoards, but you are confident is active, a FlightInfoStatus query with the tail as the ident value may be useful. It will return all recent activity associated with that tail, including flights that may no longer match the event types used in boards.