Hi guys, Rima here! 🙌🏼 I am building a website that will act as an airline assistant with real-time flight delays, cancellations, gate and terminal info with other flight details for passengers. For this, I am integrating a current airline schedules API by a familiar provider, Aviyair. I’ve used some of their other APIs (and reviewed them on my blog) before but this project is a separate one that I’ve started from scratch, so my view will be from a different angle.
➕ Disclaimer: I am not doing programming professionally and this is not a commercial project but rather a mock-up one to sharpen my skills a bit. I am an aviation enthusiast who travels a lot, so if I will end up being this website’s only user for a while, I will still be happy with it 🤓
What I am looking to achieve:
➡️ Random airport schedule data viewing
The user selects the airline through the autocomplete feature. In this case, the current airline schedules API fetches complete real-time flights of this airline for the user to view.
The user can also select the flight number if they want to view one specific flight.
➡️ Passenger push notification
The user submits their flight and flight date details at an earlier time. When details like the gate become available, they receive a push notification.
If there are any delays or cancellations, the user receives a push notification.
Real-time Airport Schedules API Documentation Summary (with 200 OK Example)
You can visit the full documentation for the real-time airport schedules API to view things yourself. However, I wanted to summarize it a little bit for my review, based on the 200 OK current airline schedules data output I received. I’ve been testing this API for a while now and can say that the response rate for the complete current airline schedules data has always been good (Postman shows around 0.3 ms) and I never received error responses when I applied the parameters as needed.
Speaking of which, these two parameters apparently must always exist in the request URL: airport_iata and type (indicates the schedule type, being departure or arrival). This means that you can’t request all airlines at once but I did not find this to be a problem for me.
GET https://data.aviyair.com/data/v1/liveschedule?key=apikey&airport_iata=del&type=arrival
{
"airline": {
"iataCode": "6E",
"icaoCode": "IGO",
"name": "IndiGo"
},
"arrival": {
"actualRunway": "2023-11-01T09:43:00.000",
"actualTime": "2023-11-01T09:43:00.000",
"baggage": null,
"delay": null,
"estimatedRunway": "2023-11-01T09:43:00.000",
"estimatedTime": "2023-11-01T09:43:00.000",
"gate": "007",
"iataCode": "DEL",
"icaoCode": "VIDP",
"scheduledTime": "2023-11-01T09:55:00.000",
"terminal": "T1 A"
},
"codeshared": null,
"departure": {
"actualRunway": "2023-011-01T08:04:00.000",
"actualTime": "2023-11-01T08:04:00.000",
"baggage": null,
"delay": "20",
"estimatedRunway": "2023-11-01T08:04:00.000",
"estimatedTime": null,
"gate": null,
"iataCode": "BOM",
"icaoCode": "VABB",
"scheduledTime": "2023-11-01T07:45:00.000",
"terminal": "2"
},
"flight": {
"iataNumber": "6E825",
"icaoNumber": "IGO825",
"number": "825"
},
"status": "landed",
"type": "arrival"
}
This is the final output I got for flight 6E825 by Indigo. As you can see, the final status of the flight is "landed". Now what I want to do is to create a push notification for when the status changes from “en-route” to “landed” (for arrival schedules) and from "scheduled" to "active" (for departure schedules). It is definitely a plus that the real-time airline schedule data does include this detail.
➡️ The status evolution in the current airline schedules API is displayed as:
- Scheduled – active – en-route – landed.
After the landed status is displayed for a while, the flight disappears from the feed as it is a real-time airline schedules data feed.
The status can also appear as “canceled” anytime depending on when a flight gets canceled (before the scheduled time or some time after being delayed)
Should You Get the Real-time Airline Schedules API? 🤔
If you have a similar project to mine, this real-time airline schedules API is something that I can recommend. I am an amateur but this API could very well be used by major projects by airlines, or developers that create apps and other solutions for airlines.
One downside of it is that they don’t provide a push notification service, so this is something that you will have to build on your end. Still, for the global real-time airline schedule data size you are getting, the price point is very reasonable. Speaking of which, you can view the prices here.
TO SUM UP: With this API, you are getting the current airline schedules data feed for all airlines, LCCs included. Global coverage for airports is a plus. You are getting flight status changes, gate, terminal, cancellation, estimated-actual-scheduled departure times, arrival times, and obviously the flight number and airline details. Both IATA and ICAO codes included.
Bonus: Your API key will also include flight tracking data. As I am thinking of adding a virtual map/flight tracking feature to the website, this is a plus for me. Maybe see what other APIs you can combine on their website.
My domain for this website is ready. When I complete the website with these features actually working, I will write another article about it by digging more into the programming side of it. For now, thanks for bearing with me and let me know if you work with similar APIs to this current airline schedules API, or if you have any suggestions for aviation projects like this one. 🫶🏼