Live Flight Map Visualisation

[Stylofly]

Hey, I’m trying to visualise all of the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service Australia) aircraft on a live flight map.

On the RFDS website they currently use the following FlightAware TV service

However to implement an alternative visualisation of the aircraft in flight I would need to have access to an endpoint with the same data provided to the FlightAware TV service.
My question is, what is the best way to go about retrieving the necessary data (lat, lon, alt, trip data, etc). RFDS have roughly 70 registered aircraft, so regularly querying them each individually isn’t a great option.

Is Firehose an option, or have I missed an easy way to retrieve the data with a relatively low amount of API calls?

[Stylofly]

I stumbled across this

Getting multiple flights and tracking them live on a map

Hi, I found FlightAware because I’m working on a student-assignment where I want to load live flight-data onto a WebGL generated world using HTML5. I’m only interested in three values. Longitude, latitude and altitude. Its only to populate it with visual nodes that are dynamic. But I want to know it ifs possible to get multiple flights at once?

which led me to this
https://flightaware.com/commercial/flightxml/explorer/#op_SearchBirdseyePositions

Is this the best option?

[dogrock]

Hello,

The SearchBirdseyeInFlight endpoint is better suited for retrieving the latest position for an active flight. It also allows for multiple ident/tails to be searched in a single query. For instance, including the query parameter {ident {VHAM* VHFG*}} would return a handful recent flights by tail.

Another method could be to use a search like {ident {FD*}} {range lat -44.119142 -10.271681} {range lon 111.621094 155.126953}. This query searches for all flights under an identifier starting with FD that are within a bounding box over Australia. However, it’s possible non-RFDS flights may be in the area with an ident starting with FD, so those may need to be filtered out after receiving the results.

[Stylofly]

Hey thanks for the reply,
I was just wondering what sorts of wildcards the API supports.
Does it allow you to put in regex type filters?
Or is it restricted to * ?

I’m basically having issues finding a good way to filter RFDS aircraft

[bovineone]

The pattern matching used by FlightXML is “glob” style (* and ?), not regexp.

With SearchBirdseyeInFlight, you can also use {in ident {N1234 N2345 N4567 N5678}} to enumerate a large number of aircraft.