UTC/Timezone confusion with dates in search parameters

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hello!

I am new to AeroAPI and I am struggling to understand how the dates filter works. I tried to find other forum posts here, but to no avail.

Let’s take the following (hypothetical) scenario: A plane is scheduled to depart from New York on 16 Dec. 2025 at 17:00 local time. This means, the UTC time will be 17. Dec. 2025 at 01:00.

When I am using flight schedule endpoint `/schedules/{start_date}/{end_date}`, do I have to explicitly consider the start_date and end_date as UTC dates (that is, to search for departure with start_date=17 Dec and end_date=18 Dec), or the search is made for the local departure times (start_date=16 Dec and end_date=17 Dec) and just the search results are containing only UTC times?

Thank you!

2

NYC EST is only 5 hours behind UTC.

New York(ROMEO) on 16 Dec. 2025 at 17:00 local time. This means, the UTC time(ZULU) will be 16. Dec. 2025 at 22:00.

3

I hope you realize that this doesn‘t answer my question… The question is if the date in the search query must be an UTC time or it is the local time of the airport.

4

The date_start and date_end date is specified in zulu time, and then used to filter against the scheduled_out ( also zulu).

All times returned (scheduled_out and scheduled_in) are also returned in zulu, as are all times throughout AeroAPI.

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