I see strange case using this service.
I try to find flight schedule for BAW272. To get this flight schedule i use parameters like startDate, endDate, airline and flightno. Flight Schedule whose i am trying to get contains departureTime equal to to 20 Jan 2016 03:25:00 GMT.
My query to retrieving this flight schedule contains given values of parameters:
startDate: 20 Jan 2016 02:44:00 GMT
endDate: 20 Jan 2016 03:44:00 GMT
airline: BAW
flightno: 272
As you can see scheduled departure time about flight BAW272 is contained between given startDate and endDate.
After executing this query service is returning empty data array.
I can see that service return this flight schedule after decresing value of startDate to 19 Jan 2016 23:44:59 GMT.
This is very bad news for me. I am downloading thousand of flight schedules using this service. Right now how can i be sure that service is returning all schedules of flights meeting the criteria?
For now i query this service for flight schedules in given one hour period of time. I am wondering if i can extend this period of time to 5 hour. After increasing this period to 5 hours response will contains 50k elements. Service can handle it? or will return error?. Even i am not sure if this solution will resolve my problem.
Is there any other solution ensuring that service will be returning all flight schedules meeting the given criteria?
I am searching for the schedules in between startDate = Tue, 19 Jan 2016 19:20:00 GMT and endDate = Tue, 19 Jan 2016 19:30:00 GMT
and I am getting a schedule with departuretime :1453260300 = Jan 19 2016 19:25:00 PST. And this is correct.
The only catch is that for startDate and endDate you need to convert the local time to timestamp using UTC.
That is why I use startDate = 1453231200 = Tue, 19 Jan 2016 19:20:00 GMT instead of startDate = 1453252800 = Tue, 19 Jan 2016 19:20:00 PST.
So it is a ‘fake time’ but FlightXML will understand what your are asking for and give you the right schedules.
Is there any way to look for a flight schedule with UTC? The problem is that I don’t know where the aircraft is (which time zone), so I need to compare UTC on the aircraft with UTC in the flight schedule database.
Is there a way AirlineFlightSchedules() can accept UTC since conversion isn’t an option? Or perhaps another FlightAware function I’m not aware of?
Hi Nick,
Right now that function only accepts local times, and I doubt this can change since it is an API used by many others.
One idea is to be more generous with your startDate and endDate, and filter more on your side depending on what flights/UTC times you are interested in. The times you provide are local, but the times you get from the call are UTC.
