FIDS Made Easier with Relative Time Ranges

We released an update to our FIDS (airport departures and arrivals) endpoint, which returns list of arriving and/or departing flights scheduled and/or planned and/or commenced within a specified time range for a specified airport and allows to answer questions like: What are the current, past or future departures or arrivals at the airport? or What is the flight schedule at the airport? or What is the flight history at the airport?

Previously, users were required to provide time range specifications in the local date-time of the airport, such as:

GET /flights/airports/icao/KLGA/2024-01-15T06:00/2024-01-15T18:00

This posed challenges, especially for queries involving current departures and arrivals, as it demanded knowledge of the airport’s timezone and local time. Even though you can still perfectly get this information using our “Current local time at the airport” endpoint, that’s an additional API call, meaning extra latency and complexity for your app.

No longer need for that! With the latest update, you can now request flight information in relative fashion, e.g.: “give me all arrivals/departures starting from 2 hours ago for the next 12 hours”:

GET /flights/airports/icao/KLGA?offsetMinutes=-120&durationMinutes=720

By the way, these are also default arguments to this new endpoint variant, meaning you can go as simple as:

GET /flights/airports/icao/KLGA

This enhanced endpoint variant is now live in our API. For details, refer to the relevant documentation.

Leave a Comment