What is the best way to get alerted when a flight is delayed? I’ve read the documentation and it seems fairly straightforward to get callbacks for arrivals, departures, cancellations and diverted aircraft, but I’m unclear about delays.
I’m hoping there is a solution that doesn’t involve polling /FlightInfoEx
Also, some additional documentation on the alerts, and the meaning of the various channels, as well as some further explanation of the alert limits would be much appreciated!
The endpoint that you register will be invoked with a POST operation by our server at the appropriate time. The contents of the POST body is a JSON document that contains various information about the event and the flight. An example of what the JSON message looks like is in flightxml/pushed-delivery-of-flightxml-requests-now-available-t13788.html
When you subscribe to “e_departure” event types, you will receive notification on the actual departure, and also any notifications of delays that might occur prior to actual departure. For delay notifications, the “eventcode” field in the JSON will be “change” and the “short_desc” will be something like this:
"American Airlines #51 flight information has changed Departure Time is now Sat 11-Feb-2012 10:40AM GMT Arrival Time is now Sat 11-Feb-2012 08:15PM GMT "
At this time, channel ID should always be specified as 16. This means that your “channels” string will always look like “{16 xxxxx}” with the xxxxx being variable depending on what event types you want to subscribe to.
There are no limits to the number of alerts you may subscribe to or receive, however you will be charged a class 2 query each time the delivery of one is attempted by our server.
Is there a channel we can use that will alert us only when a flight is delayed? We can filter the e_departure flights on our side but this could easily get very costly for us.
Hi, bovineone. Here are some questions that need your help.
How many eventcodes are there in total?
{
“long_desc”: “Hong Kong Int’l (HKG) is experiencing departure flight delays. The average delay is 00:28:00 . This may affect your tracked flight (https://flightaware.com/live/flight/id/CRK775-1530672300-schedule-0000).”,
“short_desc”: “Hong Kong Int’l (HKG) is experiencing departure flight delays of 00:28:00”,
“summary”: “Hong Kong Int’l (HKG) is experiencing departure flight delays”,
“eventcode”: “delay”,
“alert_id”: 26109617,
“flight”: {
“faFlightID”: “CRK775-1530672300-schedule-0000”,
“error”: “Extended details unavailable: build_json_flight_body_v1 could not load details”
}
}
Why is this information different from the one in flightxml/pushed-delivery-of-flightxml-requests-now-available-t13788.html?
Can you provide examples of Json message for various eventcodes?
There are about 20 different event codes at this time (and we add more every few months based on customer requests), but not all of them are available depending on your account access level.
That event did not have the “flight” optional sub-elements populated due an error loading the details of the flight. This sometimes happens, so we deliver the rest of the alert without those elements rather than discarding the alert entirely.
The different events are all identical except for the human-readable text in the short_desc, long_desc, and summary fields. You should not be attempting to parse the content of those 3 text fields (only display them literally to the user) since the formatting and translations may change over time, so we intentionally do not document their contents. The fields “alert_id”, “eventcode”, and “faFlightID” (and the other “flight” optional sub-elements when they are present) are the ones that your application should using for algorithmic processing.