SearchCount query to match 'Airborne Aircraft'

I’m using SearchCount to get the number of airborne aircraft of various types for British Airways. To start with, I just wanted to get the count of all airborne BA flights, so I used this Savon code:

response = client.call(:search_count, message: {query: “-idents BAW*” } )

I would expect that just counting up the flights with “-idents BAW*” would give the same result as BA on flightaware.com/live/fleet/, but SearchCount is coming back much higher. And, in general, SearchCount for BA and various aircraft types is coming back higher than expected (higher than the total number of aircraft they own at times).

I must be missing something. I thought maybe SearchCount was pulling in codeshare, etc., but the docs say it doesn’t. Any help would be much appreciated.

Unfortunately, SearchCount is not really a very accurate counting mechanism anymore (within the last 6 months) due to the way we internally track flight data sources now. It now returns a sort of worst-case count, which will be sometimes several times higher than the number retrieved if you try to retrieve those flights. If you think this functionality is important to you, we may be able to modify the behavior to return a more accurate number.

Yeah–if there is something you can do to make it a bit more accurate, that would be great. I’m working on a prototype for a client, and I’m afraid they’ll be turned off if the data looks really wrong.

Hi, thanks for sharing this information.
We are going to use this API as well, so I am curious that if this API’s accuracy is improved somehow or not? Thanks!