Hello. I’m trying to retrieve more or less the information that is available on the web site - the most recent flight for an aircraft no matter how old it is (provided the data exists of course), but this does not seem to be exposed in the API at all. Then, ideally, I’d like to be able to get the history just prior to that last flight, but that seems to be intentionally crippled in the API. Two questions:
- Am I missing a call where the most recent flight is exposed?
- Why is the historical data that is made available via API so crippled? Requesting rapid reports for each tail # is unrealistic for my application as I’d like to gather historical flight data for thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tails.
Any thoughts on this from the developer support team? It seems very strange that at the very least the most recent flight is not exposed via the API when it is available on the web site.
The recently added historical flight access endpoint in AeroAPI requires that the start and end parameters be supplied and have a span of at most 7 days for primarily guaranteeing good database response times.
Although a lot of the functionality is similar, our website is not implemented upon AeroAPI (although both internally share the same database), so always keep in mind that there may exist some differences in what functionality is exposed. The technique that our website internally uses to identify and display at least one flight (regardless of how old it is), isn’t currently achievable in a single AeroAPI request. However, you can repeatedly request flight history results on an ident by walking back in time one week at a time. You would probably want to use your own caching to avoid having to perform this same walk multiple times for the same ident, in order to minimize future requests.
The number of queries that would take to achieve would be both expensive and resource intensive.
This really seems like an obvious thing that should be exposed in a single call.
Thanks for your feedback–we’ll take it into consideration. I can’t comment on future functionality at this time.
We have released AeroAPI v4.11 (on 3/15/2023), which includes a new historical endpoint to quickly find the ‘last known flight’ for an aircraft registration of interest. Please give /history/aircraft/{registration}/last_flight a try.
Excellent feedback - thank you!
Fantastic, thank you so much!
