We’re introducing a new big feature: Flight Alert PUSH API. It facilitates the delivery of flight data in a fundamentally different manner. Instead of polling flight status or FIDS endpoint again and again in order to get data updates, you can now subscribe to a certain flight or airport and get notified automatically whenever an update occurs.
Currently, we support webhook notifications: upon subscription, you provide us a URL. Then, our system will be sending HTTP requests containing notification JSON-formatted data to this URL whenever a flight update occurs. URL has to meet certain requirements.
We support subscribing to flight data either by flight number or by airport ICAO code. This way you can receive updates regarding specific flights as well as all movements in specific airports.
We strongly encourage you to explore relevant documentation to become aware of all the details, limitations, and implications. The most important of them are:
- Flight subscriptions have a limited lifetime (currently, 7 days). This is so because even a single subscription can generate a significant amount of notifications. In order to prevent over-use and/or abuse of API, we keep subscriptions time-framed. However, any subscription can be refreshed before its expiration by making a relevant API call, thus prolonging its lifetime (see documentation).
- Similar to FIDS or flight status endpoints, the availability of flight subscription notifications is subject to the same data coverage and quality limitations. Therefore, before subscribing, always ensure that a flight or an airport is receiving live or ADS-B updates. If a flight / an airport only has static scheduled data and never receives live or ADS-B updates, there is no sense in subscribing to it: you will simply waste your API calls quota! Read more on this and how you can ensure this in the description to Create webhook subscription endpoint and in Data Coverage guidance.
Pricing plans were also adjusted in order to incorporate Flight subscriptions / PUSH API as well as to re-balance the whole pricing system. If you want to make use of the new PUSH API, you need to resubscribe to the new versions of the pricing plans.
Please be aware that we only include the creation and refresh of webhook subscriptions into pricing quotas, whilst deletion and retrieving information about an existing subscription is always free of charge on any plan. We also do not charge for notification calls.You can already try the new Flight Subscription / PUSH API in the RapidAPI playground.