New Year Updates

Dear users,

We have several updates:

  • [NEW] “Search airports by location” endpoint is added. It allows finding airports situated within a certain radius around the location specified. More: https://rapid.aerodatabox.com?endpoint=apiendpoint_d16d709c-fa01-4be7-87e2-050142c4d24e.
  • [NEW] “Airports supporting data feed service” health-check & status endpoint is added. It’s designed to get a list of ICAO codes of airports for which we have a certain flight data feed service operational at the moment. To get the list, you need to specify which service type you’re looking for. FlightSchedules – information about scheduled flight times. FlightLiveUpdates – live flight status and time updates. This may be useful for you to know what is the overall data coverage without the need to check each airport feed individually. Calling this endpoint is at all times free. More: https://rapid.aerodatabox.com?endpoint=apiendpoint_b350b798-40c2-4855-a057-68e4aa31bc9b 
  • [UPD] Both flight status endpoints now have the optional query string parameter “withLocation” (“false” by default). If set to “true”, API will attempt to fetch real-time positional data of the flight (location, speed, track, altitude) if it’s airborne, if it has call-sign mapped (more on this below) and if ADS-B data is available for this flight now. More: https://rapid.aerodatabox.com?endpoint=apiendpoint_43b1741c-6e96-4a0d-9ffc-6cb81d31b432  and https://rapid.aerodatabox.com?endpoint=apiendpoint_7bb681a3-45b7-49ca-bb0e-5c18888ab851.
  • [UPD] “Departures and arrivals (FIDS) by airport ICAO code” endpoint now supports getting departures or arrivals separately. Please review the new “direction” parameter. More: https://rapid.aerodatabox.com?endpoint=apiendpoint_3dbf8f9a-22de-4a99-8e7d-e542f6e63e4f.
  • [UPD] Live flight data is now generally populated with more passenger-related items: terminal, check-in desks, gate, baggage belt. The presence of this data is subject to availability in the data source.
  • [UPD] Live flight data is now enriched with real-time ADS-B data more often: much more live flights now have registrations and ATC call signs mapped once these flights are airborne. There is more to be done on this, though: the main obstacle here, besides obviously limited coverage of AeroDataBox flight data and ADS-B data, is that call signs and flight numbers don’t always match, so these items have to be correlated using different approaches, incl. analyzing routes, aircraft, and flight schedules, TBD.
  • [UPD] More airports now have a schedule and live updates flight data feeds now.

… and also a few recommendations:

  • When specifying any boolean parameter in any endpoint, please use “true” or “false”, not “1” and “0”, EVEN if the RapidAPI example states the opposite. Recent changes in the RapidAPI provider dashboard are forcing me to enter “1” or “0” when updating API endpoint documentation. And while it’s working perfectly from the provider dashboard, it doesn’t work from the marketplace for some reason. 
  • RapidAPI sometimes generates faulty code snippets. So, review them carefully before use. Review this discussion recently initiated by our users: https://rapid.aerodatabox.com/discussions/13111/404-error.
  • Always check our API website https://aerodatabox.com/ for more documentation. RapidAPI has limitations on what information can be published in the marketplace. For instance, they don’t support having documentation for response properties.

… and one more remark:

AeroDataBox API project was created a few months ago as a proof of concept of a freemium/low-cost API with limited data coverage for smaller projects. Since this little time, a few pros and cons were observed: we are seeing some demand, but also observing some misuse. Pricing plans and API usage quotas probably will be reviewed: we want to stay available for smaller projects, but we also cannot handle too many users shooting dozens of requests per second apparently in an attempt to download our database as whole 🙂

Anyway, everything is in active development now, mostly not visible outside. There are much more plans than could possibly be handled, therefore choices will be made to grow only in the most realistic directions. Any help, contributions, or suggestions are greatly appreciated. 🙂 

Happy New Year!

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