Some queries about data available

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hi,
Apologies in advance for what might seem like stupid questions.

I am looking at a project to better map aircraft activities on the tarmac and I have three questions I need help with:

  • Is it possible to get a full listing of all aircraft that take-off and land at an airport? I appreciate this will be a call for each one, but is the data complete, will every plane show up in the feed?

  • What is the frequency of update from the aircraft? I need to get a good resolution so I can see what taxi ways the planes took, so need there to be a position up date at a frequency of less than 20 seconds. Is this realistic?

  • I looked at the list of parameters available, some of them were vague, do you know if there is anyway to know the weight of a plane? eg. how many passengers are on it?

Thanks
Andrew

2

Hi Andrew,

  1. You can get a list of aircraft that take-off and land at an airport, using the functions: Arrived, Departed, you might even consider Enroute, and Scheduled:
    from the docs: https://flightxml.flightaware.com/soap/FlightXML2/doc#op_Arrived
    The completeness of data depends on our coverage. You can see our publicly available coverage here: https://flightaware.com/adsb/coverage#data-coverage
    Therefore these calls can be useful if the airports of interest are inside our coverage areas.

  2. FlightAware does not currently provide ground information. There is a plan to begin following ground positions later this year based on our ads-b data. As you can imagine not all airports will have coverage.
    Otherwise airborne aircraft positions are updated frequently, usually every 1 minute.

  3. AirlineFlightInfo has seat information for most flights, but FlightAware does not have real time information about weight/passenger counts on any particular flight.