Introducing Historical Airport and Global Delays

We have significantly expanded the capabilities of our airport delays endpoint. This endpoint is designed to get a statistical insight of the “smoothness” of flight operations in this or that airport. Until recently, it only allowed you to trace this information in real-time only. We have now changed several things:

  • [UPDATED] Airport delays endpoint now provide historical data
    Now we calculate delays and store them in our database as we aggregate our flight information. This way, we make historical airport delays available, so you can check what were the delays for this or that airport at a specific moment in the past.
    This feature is available for all pricing plans, except PRO.
  • [ADDED] Airport delays endpoint now supports historical periods
    In addition to getting historical airport delays at a single point of time in the past, you may now cover a whole period of time by a single request to this new endpoint. This way you may get insights on what were the dynamics of the delay situation within a specific period for a certain airport (did it improve or did it worsen?).
    This feature is available for all pricing plans, except PRO.
  • [ADDED] Global delays (delays for all known airports)
    Instead of checking a single airport, you may get an insight into the “global” situation – i.e. for all airports where we have live or sufficient ADS-B flight data coverage. You may now learn which airports suffer the worst delays or how smooth the flight operation is overall. This information may be requested for the present moment (available for all pricing plans) or for a certain moment in the past (available for all pricing plans, except PRO).
  • [ADDED] New property in API response
    NumQualifiedTotal – this property is introduced to specify how many flights in the batch have been actually used for delay calculation. The value of this property is always less or equal to the value of the NumTotal property. The closer the values of these properties to each other, the more reliable the delay calculation you’re looking at is. Most of the time these values will be equal. However, sometimes, not all flights we store qualify for calculation even though their “neighboring” flights might be suitable for calculation (typical for ADS-B only airports). Comparing these two values will allow you to better understand the quality of the batch.

Further Reading

Please look at these sources to learn more about these new endpoints and how the data behind them is calculated.