Hello - we are using FlightXML 3 AirlineFlightSchedules to get information on scheduled flights for a given departure airport, date, and flight number.
There is a daily Ryanair flight (FR145/RYR145) from Stansted (STN) to Berlin (SXF) which does not appear in the data from FlightXML. This appears to be a codeshare flight with Malta Air (AL145/MAY145), but based on the documentation for the AirlineFlightSchedules API we would expect this flight to be found when using Ryanair’s airline code.
Example request: https://flightxml.flightaware.com/json/FlightXML3/AirlineFlightSchedules?start_date=1597014000&end_date=1597100400&origin=STN&airline=FR&flightno=145
Response: “error”: “NO_DATA No flight schedules found for your query”
Is this a problem with the data held by FlightAware, or have we misunderstood how this API should deal with codeshare flights - and, if so, can you offer any advice on how to deal with situations like this?
Thanks
The AL145 flight from STN to SXF appears to be in our schedule data, but indeed it doesn’t appear to show the Ryanair relationship.
In fact, I do not see any codeshare flights in our schedule database for Ryanair that are actually operated by another carrier, or vice versa. Although I can see that are many thousands of flights directly operated by Ryanair in the schedule data we receive from our data providers, there are unfortunately sometimes gaps in that data we receive.
For Ryanair in particular, part of their low-cost operations as a budget airline come from the fact that they intentionally minimize their data-exchange and ticketing relationships that are widely done by all other major airlines. We are always looking to improve and increase our data coverage, and have previously made some efforts to improve our data quality for Ryanair specifically because we knew some gaps existed, but it’s clear that we may need to place some additional emphasis on them.
Thanks for your reply. I’ve done a bit more research and discovered that Malta Air is a subsidiary of Ryanair, and all of their flights are branded as Ryanair flights. Hopefully you will be able to update your systems so that these flights appear correctly in the data.
For now, I have worked around this issue by doing a secondary search using the Malta Air code if a search for a Ryanair flight returns no results.
Thanks again.
Okay, we are contacting our upstream provider of that Ryanair data to ask that they correct this codeshare relationship, but it may take some time for the changes to occur.
Our upstream provider acknowledged the issue and is working to correct the codeshare data for FR flights.
