I’m working on a pet project to collect lots of data on medevac/lifeguard flights. I have a scraper script that hits SearchBirdseyeInFlight each hour, queries all lifeguard flights, and stores that information in a database. Recently it’s come to my attention that there are some Lifeguard flights that have not made it into my database. This comes courtesy of my partner/friend who is a air ambulance pilot, and noticed that some of his company’s flights were not in my database.
I’m generating a log file of my API queries, and looking back through it, I’ve had no failures or gaps in script coverage at the times the flights in question were missed. As far as I can tell, my script is running without a hitch and getting good results on each cycle, but these flights are missing for whatever reason.
Example: flightaware.com/live/flight/N81A … /KLAX/KPDX shows as MEDEVAC on the details page, but it was not found/stored by my scraper script.
Bear in mind that I don’t have any “live” proof that this isn’t the fault of my script. That is, I haven’t looked up a current Lifeguard flight on Flightaware, then done an API query and found that flight not listed in the results. The flight mentioned above is the most recent example of this I have, and it’s way too old to show up in SearchBirdseyeInFlight results.
But I was wondering if there are known issues with coverage of these flights via the API. My gut feeling would be that the data served up by the API would match the data on the Flightaware website, but perhaps it might be something specific to the API logic for SearchBirdseyeInFlight?
I’m just trying to get the most complete data set possible here, and trying to scope out every possibility for this discrepancy. I appreciate any help.
