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About FlightXML - The Most Popular Flight Tracking API

Background

FlightAware FlightXML API (Application Programming Interface) from FlightAware allows your company to incorporate FlightAware technology into existing or new aviation software applications. FlightXML provides an industry standard XML/SOAP/WSDL-based programmatic interface to FlightAware data and statistics.

Overview

Using the FlightXML API, programs can query the FlightAware live flight information and historical datasets. Queries for in-flight aircraft return a set of matching aircraft based on a combination of location, flight or tail number, origin and/or destination airport, aircraft type, and/or a low-to-high range of altitude and/or ground speed, among others. For each matching aircraft, data returned includes the flight or tail number, the aircraft type, origin and destination, time the last position was received, and the longitude, latitude, groundspeed, and altitude of that position. Matching flights' flight tracks can be requested as well.

For airports, FlightXML queries can return a list of scheduled flights, flights that have departed, flights that are enroute to the airport, and flights that have arrived at the airport.

Example Applications

Leveraging the flexibility of the FlightXML API customers can dream up new applications that FlightAware never envisioned. Possible uses include:
  • Integrate FlightXML radar data with your existing flight dispatch software.
  • Create a customized alerting system based on the current status of your fleet.
  • Streamline flight planning by showing common routes as cleared by air traffic control between two airports.
  • Add real flight data to your simulations.
  • Show flight tracks in Google Earth.
  • Create visualizations of traffic patterns.
  • Add live flight information to your company's website.
  • Implement the next billion dollar idea and impress us all.

Supported Platforms

FlightXML can be used on any Internet-capable programming language that supports XML. FlightAware has developed example code for implementing Directflight on many popular programming languages such as Microsoft .NET, PHP, Perl, Java, Tcl, and Python.

Requirements

FlightXML is intended for implementation by software developers. Implementing the FlightAware FlightXML API requires medium-level expertise at software development including the ability to parse an XML WSDL file, make TCP XML requests using SOAP, and understanding the local development requirements to manage the results to achieve the outcome of the desired application.

Pricing

FlightXML is priced on a volume-basis with a per-transaction fee. There are three classes of transactions based on the complexity of the request. The more queries that a user account makes per month, the less the per-query fee is.

The classes of queries separate the most complex queries for FlightAware to deliver from the more simple queries. For example, requesting a list of aircraft en route to LAX would be a higher class query than requesting the name and location of an airport. Requesting the heading of an aircraft based on two positions would be an even lower class query.

At the lowest end of the volume scale (from 1 to 9,999 queries a month), each query is only $0.012. Therefore, if your application made two queries every 10 minutes, your monthly bill would be $87.84. However, if your application made five queries every 5 minutes, your monthly bill would be $219.60.

Pricing Tier Cost per query
Total queries per month Class 2 Class 3 Class 4
Fewer than 10,000 $0.0120 $0.0030 $0.0012
10,000 - 25,000 $0.0070 $0.0018 $0.0007
25,000 - 50,000 $0.0060 $0.0015 $0.0006
50,000 - 100,000 $0.0050 $0.0013 $0.0005
100,000 - 250,000 $0.0040 $0.0010 $0.0004
250,000 - 1,000,000 $0.0030 $0.0008 $0.0003
1,000,000 - 5,000,000 $0.0020 $0.0005 $0.0002
More than 5,000,000? Contact FlightAware

Get Started Now: Documentation / FlightXML SDK

General

Platform-specific examples

Featured Customers

Do you have a great FlightXML implementation in a web-based application or traditional software package? Send us an e-mail about it and be featured on this page!

Need help?

Free Support

Read the FlightXML FAQ or read and contribute to the FlightXML Developers Discussion Forum.

Commercial Support

FlightXML customers using or committed to a minimum of 500,000 queries a month are entitled to free development support. Lower volume customers are offered development support at a rate of $200/hr with a minimum of one hour per incident. Commercial Support