Hi all, first time posting here so pardon me if I make any mistakes or forget anything important in my description of the problem. I’m currently working on a project that tracks certain sites across the USA to find what flights (if any) passed over said site given a certain altitude and groundspeed range.
I originally started with the standard GET route flights/search, which proved to not help me find when planes were flying over the site but instead found flights that departed (or landed, it wasn’t very clear) from nearby.
As this was not the solution I was looking for, I went back to the API docs page and found the GET route flights/search/positions, but this created a whole new issue. In order to make this track flights that would have been near a single site, I set a range for the lat and lon options (so my query looked like this: {<= alt 100} {<= gs 200} {range lat value1 value2} {range lon value1 value2}). This timed out every time I tried to run it.
My next idea was to simplify the query and try to prune the results from my end, but I encountered new issues. The new query ({{<= alt 100} {<= gs 200}) gave actual results, but the “num_pages” parameter was the new problem. If I don’t know how many flights there were with those conditions in the US in the last 24 hours, I can’t know how many pages I want to return, and so I don’t have any real way of ensuring that I got all of them.
I did notice that there was also a “cursor” parameter, but there wasn’t any good documentation on how this is supposed to be used, so I ignored it for the time being. I feel like this may contribute to solving my problem, but I’m not sure how to figure that out without seeing some sort of example.
If there is something I am misunderstanding or explaining poorly please let me know. Thank you for taking the time to read all this.