Hi,
According to API documentation for Search API, it can be called with search term like this “-idents "DAL123"” and “{ident {DAL*}}”. Can the idents be tail numbers? It always returns null or no data found for valid tail numbers. From documentation it seems that ident is either flightno or tail number. But search apis seems to not returning any data for tailnumbers. Is this by design or is this a bug?
Searching by “ident” will only find flights by whatever identifier they actually operated the flight as. If the flight was operating as its registration number then it will match, but not if it was operating as an airline flight number.
You can however issue a separate SearchBirdseyeInFlight request for “{= reg XXXXX}” to match against specific tail numbers when the flight operated as a flight number and FlightAware happens to know the aircraft registration number (which I’ve mentioned previously is not always the case for all flights).