FlightInfoEx question re delays and cancellations

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

I’m using FlightInfoEx to get the status of the current commercial airline flight status.

  1. How do I figure out flight delays. e.g. scheduled departure time is 3:00 - but it’s been delayed till 4:00.

The XML result only contains scheduled departure and actual departure.

  1. How do I figure out a cancelled flight?

  2. What does the divert field hold - when a flight is diverted. How do I figure out the new expected arrival
    time - not the scheduled arrival time. This applies to #1 also.

2

FlightXML2 does not currently expose estimated departure time, which is what I suspect you would like to see. A future version of our API is planned to do this, however.

For now, you can compute an approximated estimated departure time by computing the result of: (estimated_arrivaltime - filed_ete).

When a flight is cancelled, the actualarrivaltime and actualdeparturetime will be -1

When a flight is diverted, the new ETA may be available through the estimatedarrivaltime, but that is subject to being incorrect since many things occurring during a diversion are unusual and atypical so ATC infrequently does not properly update all aspects of the flight plan.

3

Thanks for the reply.

What does the diverted field contain in case of a divert - diverted airport id etc.

Also can you answer my other question re out/in times.

Looking at the changelogs for the API - I see last change was in 2013. Is that correct?

I’m just wondering what are the chances of some improvements to the API relatively soon.

4

I replied in the other thread.

FlightXML3 is expected to be available in 2016, so expect new improvements then.