For businesses operating in sectors like logistics, travel and booking, and aviation, flight data is crucial. It gives them valuable information regarding real-time flight status, delays, flight schedules, airline routes, airports, and more. Companies can use this extensive data to their advantage in various ways. For example, airline companies can utilize this data to enhance operational management and optimize flight schedules. They can also integrate this data into their websites or apps to provide up-to-date and accurate flight information. Likewise, booking platforms can integrate accurate flight data to enhance customer experience. This is where a flight tracker API comes in handy.
A flight tracker API is essentially an application programming interface that allows you to integrate extensive flight data into your websites, apps, and platforms. You can use it to create booking platforms and flight tracking applications, enhance your existing platforms, visualize and monitor global flights, and more.
However, not all APIs are made equal and their data accuracy and performance vary depending on various factors. That’s why it’s essential to pick a reliable and efficient flight tracker API.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll discuss the factors to consider when choosing the best flight tracker API. We’ll also review the features of some of the top flight tracker APIs.
Table of Contents
What to Look for in a Flight Tracker API
Real-Time Data Accuracy
Many APIs and services claim to provide real-time flight data, such as flight status information, schedules, delays, and cancellations. However, not all services provide accurate real-time data.
Assess whether the API sources data from dependable sources, such as official aviation authorities, airports, airlines, etc. Also, check whether it aggregates data from multiple reliable sources. This will help you gauge the API’s data accuracy.
Historical Data
Historical flight data is helpful for analysis, understanding and forecasting trends, and reporting. If you need such data for your business, ensure that the API supports historical flight data.
Additionally, check how far back the historical data goes. Some APIs provide data for several years, which can be useful for long-term studies.
Ease of Integration
While choosing an accurate and reliable flight tracker API is crucial, it’s equally important to consider its ease of integration. Otherwise, you’ll be spending lots of time and effort figuring out how to integrate the API into your app, platform, or system, especially if you’re working with an API for the first time.
Look for an API that’s properly documented. The documentation should provide all the details about the API usage, endpoints, parameters, and error-handling mechanisms. Good API documentation also contains code examples in various programming languages.
Besides documentation, check if the API adheres to industry standards like REST, JSON, and OAuth. This makes integration even more straightforward and secure.
Global Coverage
Choosing an API that covers flights, airports, and airlines globally is crucial if your app caters to an international audience.
Check API documentation and official resources to ensure that the API includes all major and minor airports and airlines worldwide.
Scalability
A certain amount of API requests might be enough for your app/platform in the beginning, but as your user base grows, you’d need more API requests. Therefore, choosing a scalable API that can handle high volumes of requests is a step in the right direction.
Ensure that the API maintains consistent performance under high load, with low latency and high availability.
Pricing
Compare the cost of the API against its features and the value it provides.
Look for an API with clear pricing plans and options that align with your budget. Assess the pricing model of the API, such as whether the API charges based on:
- The number of requests
- Data points accessed
- Users served.
Also, check if the API offers a free plan or trial period. This will allow you to test its features and performance before committing to a paid plan.
Top Flight Tracker APIs for Developers
Aviationstack
Aviationstack is a comprehensive flight data API. It provides real-time and historical information about flights, airlines, airports, and other aviation-related data.
Key features and benefits
- Live flight tracking: The API supports real-time tracking of flights. The information includes flight status, departure and arrival times, delays, and cancellations.
- Historical flight data: Provides access to accurate historical flight data for analysis and reporting. You can provide a date of your choice in your API request to retrieve historical data.
- Airline routes: You can retrieve valuable data about airline routes, such as departure and arrival airports and times, terminals, and more. Aviationstack updates this data every 24 hours to ensure accuracy.
- Airport data: With Aviationstack, you can get detailed data about global airports (10,000+). This includes location, IATA/ICAO codes, and timezone data. Aviationstack also supports a ‘search’ request parameter for airport autocomplete suggestions.
- Airline data: Provides information on airlines (13,000+), such as name, IATA/ICAO codes, and fleet details. The API is also capable of providing detailed information about different airplanes and aircrafts.
- Airline routes lookup: Aviationtack provides highly accurate information on available flight routes, including direct and connecting flights.
- Schedules: The API also supports timetable information for flights. This includes scheduled departure and arrival times.
- High accuracy and worldwide coverage: Aviationstack is backed by highly reliable aviation data sources, providing accurate flight data. Additionally, the API supports 250+ countries and 13,000+ airlines, providing global coverage.
- High scalability: Aviationstack is built using a scalable cloud infrastructure. This makes it powerful enough to handle any volume, from thousands of requests per month to millions per minute.
- Easy to integrate: Aviationstack is a JSON REST with detailed documentation. Thus, it’s quite simple and easy to integrate into your apps.
Use cases
- Travel agencies and booking platforms can integrate the API to provide real-time aircraft tracking and flight status updates to customers. The API can also be used to send automated notifications for flight delays, cancellations, or gate changes.
- Airline companies can use Aviationstack’s real-time data for operational management and optimizing flight schedules. They can also improve customer service by providing accurate flight information.
- Logistics and freight companies can track air cargo in real-time. This helps optimize supply chain and delivery operations. Moreover, they can use historical data to analyze performance and plan future routes.
- Developers can use the Aviationstack API to create apps for flight tracking, airport guides, or travel planning tools. They can also build apps for analyzing flight patterns, airport traffic, and airline performance.
Pricing
Free plan: 100 monthly API requests, complete aviation data, real-time flight tracking, and HTTPS encryption.
Aviationstack also offers multiple budget-friendly paid plans starting from $$49.99. There is also a custom pricing plan that can be tailored according to your requirements.
Aviation Edge
Aviation Edge offers various APIs, covering extensive flight data. This includes flight tracking, historical data, airline schedules, airport information, and more
Key features and benefits
- Real-time flight tracking: Provides real-time data on flights, including departure and arrival times, speed, delays, and cancellations.
- Historical flight schedules: Provides detailed data on historical airport timetables.
- Flight schedules: The API provides access to historical, current, and future flight schedules. The information includes flight status, such as active, scheduled, landed etc, departure and arrival times, terminal and gate information, airline name, flight number, and more.
- Airline routes: With Aviation Edge, you can also retrieve data about the airline routes. This includes the routes between all the airports an airline operates on.
- Airlines data: Provides access to a comprehensive database of airlines worldwide. This includes IATA and ICAO codes, names, fleet details, and hub airports.
- Aircraft and airplane database: Aviation Edge also has an extensive aircraft database. It contains publicly available information on various types of aircrafts. The information includes registration information, production information, related ICAO and IATA codes, and more.
- Reliable data: Aviation Edge gathers data from various sources and aggregates it to ensure accuracy. These sources also include aviation authorities and various airlines.
- Easy integration: Aviation Edge data easily integrates with existing systems through RESTful APIs. Additionally, the APIs can be used with multiple programming languages.
Use cases
Since Aviation Edge provides extensive flight data, it can be integrated into various types of apps, websites, and platforms, from travel management websites and booking platforms to aviation dashboards and flight comparison platforms.
Pricing
Aviation Edge offers various paid pricing plans. While there is no free plan, the platform allows you to test its API services at a discounted price.
For example, the actual price of its starter/developer plan is $299, but you can get it for $7 for the first month. After that, you’ll be charged the actual amount.
FlightAPI
FlightAPI is a platform that offers multiple APIs for retrieving flight-related data. This includes flight prices, live plane tracking, flight status, airport and flight schedules, and more.
Key features and benefits
- Flight prices: FlightAPI offers a Price Data API that you can leverage to cand track flight prices from various airlines. The API supports prices for oneway and round trips, as well as multi-city trips. Additionally, it allows you to select your desired currency in which you want to see the prices.
- Flight tracking: With flight tracking or flight status API, you can get access to accurate information for almost any flight/plane. The data includes flight status, departure and arrival times and dates, and flight number. You can also track flights can track future flights (up to 365 days) between any two airports.
- Airport schedule: With this API, you can get the complete schedule of any airport. The API also allows you to retrieve data according to arrivals and departures separately. The API provides detailed schedule data, including position/coordinates, country, timezone, and elevation.
- Reliable data sources: The platform sources data directly from the aviation industry and airport authorities to provide accurate and up-to-date data. It has also partnered with various other industry leads for data sources to further enhance data accuracy.
- Easy to integrate: FlightAPI offers simple and easy-to-integrate REST APIs, making the Integration process quicker. With just a single GET request, you retrieve your desired data in JSON format.
Use cases
The FlightAPI platform is designed for businesses and developers who need accurate and up-to-date aviation data for various applications.
Besides apps and platforms like flight tracking, booking, and aviation analytics, FlightAPI can also be used to create apps for flight price comparison. This way, users can easily compare and track prices from various airlines, enhancing the user experience.
Pricing
FlightAPI doesn’t offer a free tier, but it gives you 50 free API requests when you sign up for the first time. This way, you can test the platform and its services.
It also offers various flexible premium plans starting from $49/month.
Top Flight Tracker APIs – Comparison Table
| Aviationstack | Aviation Edge | FlightAPI | |
| Real-time flight status and tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Historical data | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Flights schedule | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Airport database | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Airlines and aircraft database | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Airlines routes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Flight prices | No | No | Yes |
| Airline reviews | No | No | Yes |
Supported data formats |
JSON | JSON, XML | JSON, XML |
| API documentation | Detailed and well-documented with coding examples in various programming languages | Detailed documentation but doesn’t contain as detailed coding examples as Aviationstack’s documentation | Extensive documentation with coding examples. |
| Free plan | Yes, supports 100 API requests per month | No free plan but offers discounts for new users for one month | No free tier but provides 50 API requests to new users |
| Premium plans price range (per month) | $49.99 – $499.99, also offers a custom plan with custom pricing | $299-$1499, provides a custom plan with custom pricing | $49-$399+ |
| Scalability | Highly scalable, can handle high volumes of requests | Highly scalable for enterprise solutions | Scalable for small to large enterprises, |
| Ease of integration | Easy to integrate REST API | Offers REST APIs that are easy to integrate | Simple and easy to integrate RESTful APIs |
| Coverage | Global | Global | Worldwide |
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Why Aviationstack Could Be Your Best Bet
All the Flight tracker APIs we’ve reviewed are high-performance, highly efficient and provide accurate data. However, Aviationstack is slightly ahead with its reliability, ease of integration, customer support, extensive documentation, and scalable infrastructure.
Moreover, Aviationstack is a cost-effective solution offering a free plan as well as various budget-friendly paid plans with premium features.
Aviationstack’s comprehensive feature set covers the essential needs of businesses operating across industries, especially those in the travel and aviation sectors. Whether you’re building a travel app, integrating real-time flight data into a booking platform, or conducting aviation market research, Aviationstack is a great choice.
How to Get Started with Your Chosen API
Here are the basic steps to get started with a Flight Tracker API:
- Go to the API’s official page
- Choose a subscription plan and sign up
- Obtain your API key from your developer’s dashboard. You would need to include this key to make successful API calls.
- Refer to the API documentation to make API calls.
Integrating Aviationstack
You can follow the above steps to get your Aviationstack API key. Here, we’ll provide various coding examples for integrating the API:
PHP (Real-time flight data)
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$queryString = http_build_query([ 'access_key' => 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY' ]); $ch = curl_init(sprintf('%s?%s', 'https://api.aviationstack.com/v1/flights', $queryString)); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $json = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); $api_result = json_decode($json, true); foreach ($api_result['results'] as $flight) { if (!$flight['live']['is_ground']) { echo sprintf("%s flight %s from %s (%s) to %s (%s) is in the air.", $flight['airline']['name'], $flight['flight']['iata'], $flight['departure']['airport'], $flight['departure']['iata'], $flight['arrival']['airport'], $flight['arrival']['iata'] ), PHP_EOL; } } |
Python
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import requests params = { 'access_key': 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY' } api_result = requests.get('https://api.aviationstack.com/v1/flights', params) api_response = api_result.json() for flight in api_response['results']: if (flight['live']['is_ground'] is False): print(u'%s flight %s from %s (%s) to %s (%s) is in the air.' % ( flight['airline']['name'], flight['flight']['iata'], flight['departure']['airport'], flight['departure']['iata'], flight['arrival']['airport'], flight['arrival']['iata'])) |
Node.js
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const axios = require('axios'); const params = { access_key: 'YOUR_ACCESS_KEY' } axios.get('https://api.aviationstack.com/v1/flights', {params}) .then(response => { const apiResponse = response.data; if (Array.isArray(apiResponse['results'])) { apiResponse['results'].forEach(flight => { if (!flight['live']['is_ground']) { console.log(`${flight['airline']['name']} flight ${flight['flight']['iata']}`, `from ${flight['departure']['airport']} (${flight['departure']['iata']})`, `to ${flight['arrival']['airport']} (${flight['arrival']['iata']}) is in the air.`); } }); } }).catch(error => { console.log(error); }); |
Example API Response
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{ "pagination": { "limit": 100, "offset": 0, "count": 100, "total": 1669022 }, "data": [ { "flight_date": "2019-12-12", "flight_status": "active", "departure": { "airport": "San Francisco International", "timezone": "America/Los_Angeles", "iata": "SFO", "icao": "KSFO", "terminal": "2", "gate": "D11", "delay": 13, "scheduled": "2019-12-12T04:20:00+00:00", "estimated": "2019-12-12T04:20:00+00:00", "actual": "2019-12-12T04:20:13+00:00", "estimated_runway": "2019-12-12T04:20:13+00:00", "actual_runway": "2019-12-12T04:20:13+00:00" }, "arrival": { "airport": "Dallas/Fort Worth International", "timezone": "America/Chicago", "iata": "DFW", "icao": "KDFW", "terminal": "A", "gate": "A22", "baggage": "A17", "delay": 0, "scheduled": "2019-12-12T04:20:00+00:00", "estimated": "2019-12-12T04:20:00+00:00", "actual": null, "estimated_runway": null, "actual_runway": null }, "airline": { "name": "American Airlines", "iata": "AA", "icao": "AAL" }, "flight": { "number": "1004", "iata": "AA1004", "icao": "AAL1004", "codeshared": null }, "aircraft": { "registration": "N160AN", "iata": "A321", "icao": "A321", "icao24": "A0F1BB" }, "live": { "updated": "2019-12-12T10:00:00+00:00", "latitude": 36.28560000, "longitude": -106.80700000, "altitude": 8846.820, "direction": 114.340, "speed_horizontal": 894.348, "speed_vertical": 1.188, "is_ground": false } }, [...] ] } |
Conclusion
A flight tracker API or aviation data API is a valuable tool for businesses in sectors like logistics, travel and booking, and aviation. Developers can also leverage the API to create booking platforms, flight-tracking apps, aviation analytics dashboards, and more.
Top flight tracking APIs include Aviationstack, Aviation Edge, and Flight API. In this article, we’ve reviewed these APIs in detail.
In our opinion, Aviationstack stands out with its high accuracy, ease of use and integration, extensive documentation, excellent customer support, affordable pricing plans, and scalability.
Sign up for Aviationstack today for free and get access to accurate flight data!
FAQs
What is the free API for flight search?
Avaiationstack is a free flight tracker API that provides valuable flight data. This includes real-time flight tracking, flight schedules, flight status, and more.
Which flight tracker is free?
Avaiationstack is a flight tracker API that offers a free plan. The free tier includes 100 monthly API requests.
What is API on flights?
A flight tracking API provides extensive information regarding real-time flight status, delays, flight schedules, airline routes, airports, and more.
