FlightXML API does not return exact coincidences

[taxiclassrent]

Hello,

I’ve an issue with your rest api.

If I query for to check if the flight with ident: BA48 exists, your API returns true. But the flight does not exists…

It’s returning true because it’s returning a flight with ident: BAW48 , but that’s not the flight I was asking for.

So my first question is: there is a way for to say to your api that only return exact coincidences?

And another question: How I could call your API for to get only flights that arrivals to a concrete airport?

Thanks in advance.

[bovineone]

Most of our APIs automatically normalize inputs to match what you likely meant since most users would prefer to get some result rather than requiring them to do the input cleanup first.

Keep in mind that we also do various normalization and sanitization steps during our data processing of raw flight data. Flights in Europe frequently fly with an ATC-assigned ident that is modified to avoid similar-sounding identifiers being read aloud on the radio at the same time (for example “BAW flight 824” operates as “BAW82DW” but we normalize it back to “BAW824”). Sometimes airlines omit their airline identifier and program only their flight number “1234” into their transponder rather than “SWA1234”. Other times, due to legacy reasons airlines may program only their IATA airline code rather than their ICAO airline code into their transponder, so we will normalize that to the ICAO version as well.

The “Search”, “SearchBirdseyeInFlight”, and “SearchBirdseyePositions” functions are implemented as lower-level interfaces and don’t do any significant input validation to the query strings they accept. Additionally, if you logon to our website and go to flightaware.com/account/manage/ and enabled “position only flights” then some additional automatic ident normalizations will be disabled (however you will also receive more flights that have resulted from VFR operations and spurious data).

If you want to find flights arriving at an airport, you can use the “Arrived” function. You can also use “AirlineFlightSchedules” if you want to search further in the future for specific dates.

[taxiclassrent]

Ok,

Thank you very much for your answer.

For to solve this, I’m manually doing the validation that checks the flight ident is exactly the same.

@bovineone

Most of our APIs automatically normalize inputs to match what you likely meant since most users would prefer to get some result rather than requiring them to do the input cleanup first.

Keep in mind that we also do various normalization and sanitization steps during our data processing of raw flight data. Flights in Europe frequently fly with an ATC-assigned ident that is modified to avoid similar-sounding identifiers being read aloud on the radio at the same time (for example “BAW flight 824” operates as “BAW82DW” but we normalize it back to “BAW824”). Sometimes airlines omit their airline identifier and program only their flight number “1234” into their transponder rather than “SWA1234”. Other times, due to legacy reasons airlines may program only their IATA airline code rather than their ICAO airline code into their transponder, so we will normalize that to the ICAO version as well.

The “Search”, “SearchBirdseyeInFlight”, and “SearchBirdseyePositions” functions are implemented as lower-level interfaces and don’t do any significant input validation to the query strings they accept. Additionally, if you logon to our website and go to flightaware.com/account/manage/ and enabled “position only flights” then some additional automatic ident normalizations will be disabled (however you will also receive more flights that have resulted from VFR operations and spurious data).

If you want to find flights arriving at an airport, you can use the “Arrived” function. You can also use “AirlineFlightSchedules” if you want to search further in the future for specific dates.