xml api quote

FlightAware AeroAPI
1

Hi,I’m looking to use your api and my estimates for the number of queries is quite high.  I’m currently only looking to get the “current” position of the plane and it’s flight plan.My estimated queries are about 14.4 million per month.  Could you provide me with a quote?  Also if the flight plan changes in the air due to some event, do you get the updated flight plan?

2

That seems like a rather high number for just one plane, which although we can support that volume, is probably higher than you actually need…

  • We recommend requesting position information (such as using InFlightInfo) no more frequently than once per minute per aircraft.

  • Rather than polling flight status unconditionally at a high rate, consider using another technique to determine when the aircraft is likely to be in the air and only using a higher polling rate when that is the case. You can use pushed alerts (SetAlert) to receive notification of when significant flight events occur, or you can infrequently call FlightInfoEx to see when the next scheduled flight will be departing and.

  • If your goal is just to capture all of the positions for a flight, and not necessarily follow it in real-time, then you can use GetLastTrack to retrieve those points in bulk.

  • If you are trying to track the current positions of multiple aircraft, you can use SearchBirdseyeInFlight or SearchBirdseyePositions with a filter expression that will match the multiple aircraft you want and limit the timestamps to just ones that have moved since the last time you checked.

Ensuring you’re requesting the data in the most efficient way is probably a better first step.

3

it would probably be a lot less, but I want to do worst case. We’re trying to track current position as current as possible with many planes in many different areas. So if i were to do a searchBirdeyePosition, what is the max lat/lon box i can query at one time?

4

There is no specifically enforced limit to the lat/lon range you can request, but the number of results returned will be limited to your request settings. In general, I try not to receive more than a thousand elements back from any single query, just to ensure responsiveness in my own application.

5

ok thank you that’ll greatly reduce our possible number of queries. also we’re trying to get the planes’ flight plans and i see that you guys offer them. But if the flight plans changes mid air or at any time really, do you guys get the new amended plans and would you happen to know the delay from time it was changed to when you guys get it?

Thanks

6

If the flight is currently in a primary coverage area (US, Canada, Australia) then flight plan data is generally available and will be 5 minutes or less delayed. Outside of those areas, we usually will not have actual ATC flight plans/routes, but we might have position/departure/arrival information (depending on airline partnerships or transponder capability).