I am Colin from mtel. As we are going to use Flight Tracking and Flight Status API, wanna to clarify below items:
The returned results of api Arrived/Departed/Enroute contain ident, Except identify a flight by ident, is it possible to identify a flight by other combination(e.g. aircrafttype+ estimatedarrivaltime) ?
Could please provide the sample of ‘ident’? CPA543 is an example of ident? if so, there will be more than one flight with the same ident(different schedule date)
the returned results of Enroute API will include Flights that en-route for more than 24 hours?
Could please provide the returned results examples of api Arrived/Departed/Enroute for our reference?(If possible, please provide the sample of Flights with multi stop, such as CX 888)
The FlightInfoEx api can return the unique faFlightID for an instance of a flight if given the ident and the departure time (actual or scheduled). FlightInfoEx can also return multiple entries if the time is not specified or use a faFlightID as an ident to constantly return the same flight.
FlightInfoEx get all instances of CPA543 from newest (normally 2-3 days future) to about two weeks old: https://flightxml.flightaware.com/json/FlightXML2/FlightInfoEx?ident=CPA543
FlightInfoEx get CPA543 from 01-Feb-2018 based on filed departure: https://flightxml.flightaware.com/json/FlightXML2/FlightInfoEx?ident=CPA543@1517449500
FlightInfoEx get CPA543 from 01-Feb-2018 based on actual departure: https://flightxml.flightaware.com/json/FlightXML2/FlightInfoEx?ident=CPA543@1517451293
FlightInfoEx get CPA543 from 01-Feb-2018 based on faFlightID https://flightxml.flightaware.com/json/FlightXML2/FlightInfoEx?ident=CPA543-1517276700-schedule-0001:2
Multi-stop flights will be broken down to unique faFlightID values per segment. Since epoch time is used and multi-stop flight are tracked per segment there are no flights that can be enroute for more than 24 hours.
Could please provide the returned results examples of api Arrived/Departed/Enroute for our reference?(If possible, please provide the sample of Flights with multi stop, such as CX 888)
No, “filed” refers to the details within the flight plan that were originally filed with ATC and is typically the same as the original scheduled (or derived from it with padding for taxiing).
It is similar but not precisely the same. Here are the main “adjectives” that can be applied to the types of times:
scheduled (itinerary booking)
filed (flight plan)
estimated
actual
And the different types of times that can have those adjectives are:
gate out (block out)
departure (runway, wheels up, weight off wheels)
arrival (runway, wheels down, weight on wheels)
gate in (block in)
FlightXML2 does not provide all of those combinations, so you may need to use FlightXML3 beta if you need some of them (particularly estimated departure time).
The published airline schedule times (including from the AirlineFlightSchedule function) generally refer to the gate out (block out) time, however the filed_departuretime refers to the runway (wheels up) time. Therefore the departure time is generally a few minutes (approximately 10-15 or so) later than the block out time, and may potentially be on the next day if a flight is close to midnight.
If you are interested in getting the current status and the scheduled gate time in one operation, then you can consider using FlightXML3’s FlightInfoStatus function with include_ex_data=true to retrieve the filed_blockout_time field.
Currently encounter below difficulty:
we get ident and schedule_datetime(e.g ident=CPA278, schedule_datatime=2019-01-15 15:05:00) from another data feed, how should we get the specified flight data(include en-route data) from flightaware data feed by ident and schedule? which APIs should be called?
If you know the ident and scheduled departure time, you can call FlightInfoEx using the “ident@epoch” syntax. The epoch timestamp must be in UTC and must be close to what we know for the departure time.
Alternatively, just call FlightInfoEx using ident only and look through the results to find the flight that matches the timestamp as closely as possible.
That timestamp is not correct because it has too many zeros. It needs to be in epoch seconds, not epoch milliseconds.
Additionally, if you meant 1547171400 (2019-01-11 01:50:00 GMT), then that timestamp is not close enough to the flight’s departure time of 2019-01-11 20:20:00 GMT nor offblock time of 2019-01-11 20:10:00 GMT. Be sure that you are using the departure and not arrival time, and be sure that you are converting the time to GMT/UTC time.
Of course, if you don’t know the precise timestamp that we have for that flight, you can simply request it with just the ident. That will cause multiple recent flights to be returned and your app can loop over the returned flights to find the particular instance that is closest to the one you need:
Incidentally, you should try to use the faFlightID that we use for a flight as much as possible (rather than using the “ident@timestamp” format). For example: the faFlightID for the flight in my first URL of this post is ACA7-1554787541-airline-0151 and can be loaded using this request:
