Real-Time Global Aviation Data With the aviationstack API

Aviation is among the most important global industries because it connects people and businesses across cities, countries, and continents. It is the only rapid transportation network that spans the world. However, aviation isn’t just about transporting people; today’s economy almost completely depends upon the timely delivery of goods and services. Major retailers rely upon the aviation industry to quickly move products to their customers.

Aviation is at the heart of today’s business and lifestyle, and whether you’re building booking platforms, visualizing and monitoring global flights, or creating popular flight tracking applications, apilayer’s aviationstack API can help you deliver usable and meaningful experiences to your clients by providing real-time flight tracking, flight schedules and routes, and historical flight data.

What Is the aviationstack API?

Simply put, aviationstack is an easy-to-use and cost-effective RESTful API that provides aviation-oriented data. It delivers not only real-time flight status, but also schedules, airline routes, airports, aircraft, and even historical flight data. 

aviationstack is built upon the powerful, auto-scaling apilayer cloud infrastructure. It can therefore handle as few or as many requests your application needs—from a few requests per day to millions of requests an hour!

Thanks to real-time data integration with one of the most sophisticated aviation data vendors on the market, aviationstack delivers accurate flight data that you can use to build booking and tracking applications. The aviationstack API makes it easy to:

• track flights based on any number of criteria
• search for specific types of aircraft
• retrieve information about cities and airports—their time zones, geolocation, and IATA codes
• and much more! 

Features: Why Use the aviationstack API?

Thousands of companies use aviationstack to power their booking platforms, map visualizations, and flight tracking applications because aviationstack's feature set is unparalleled. Here are just a few features:

Accurate Real-Time Tracking

aviationstack is tightly integrated with one of the most sophisticated aviation data vendors on the market. Therefore, real-time flight data is delayed by as little as 30–60 seconds.

Lookup Airline Routes and Schedules

The aviationstack API can provide data about airline routes based upon the airline, flight number, and arrival/departure airports.

Worldwide Coverage

aviationstack delivers accurate details of most global flights, regardless of what stage the flight is currently in.

Airports, Airplanes, and Airlines Oh My

You can retrieve relevant information about thousands of airplanes, airlines, airports, terminals, gates, and more from across the globe. 

Historical Flight Data

aviationstack delivers granular historical flight data (flight numbers, dates, times, airports, terminals, gates, etc.) because they’ve been storing that information since day one.

JSON Format

aviationstack always responds with structured data that can be easily parsed and analyzed.

Security

The aviationstack API supports 256-bit encryption for all paid tiers so that you don’t have to worry about your requests being transmitted in the clear.

Scalable

Like all of apilayer’s services, aviationstack is highly scalable and can meet your smallest and largest demands.

99.9% Uptime

Uptime is important, and thanks to being built on apilayer's cloud infrastructure, aviationstack’s 99.9% uptime ensures that it is highly available for your needs.

Fantastic Documentation

The API is well documented, providing all the information you need in order to issue your requests and handle the resulting responses. They even provide code samples to get you started!

How It Works

The aviationstack API is built on RESTful principles, and it exposes several endpoints to handle requests for different information (e.g. flights and airports). API requests are sent with a valid access key and any number of required or optional query parameters. Responses vary based upon the requested data, but the JSON structures are well organized and documented.

Quick Tutorial

Getting started with aviationstack is simple and straightforward. First, you need to register an account. You will then be taken to the API Quickstart Guide. 

Here you receive your access key for authentication, a list of the available endpoints, and a few request examples to get you started.

Simply plug in your access key and make a request. The API always responds with JSON, but if it is successful, you will receive a structure containing your requested flight data. Here is a portion of an actual response:

Naturally, you’ll need to consult aviationstack’s excellent documentation for your specific integration needs and requirements. You’ll also find a variety of code samples for several languages, demonstrating how to access, query, and handle the API’s responses.

It’s important to note that aviationstack’s free plan is not encrypted, so you must therefore use plain ol' HTTP for free requests. If you attempt to use HTTPS with the free plan, the API responds with a JSON structure indicating that the free plan does not support HTTPS encryption.

Pricing

The aviationstack API has several subscription plans, including a Free plan that you can use for testing and personal use. It provides basic functionality and a limit of 500 requests per month.

You can gain access to more features and data endpoints by choosing from the following subscription plans:

Basic: This plan includes 10,000 monthly requests, unlimited support, HTTPS encryption for all requests, and access to additional endpoints (such as historical data, airline routes, and autocomplete).

Professional (Bestseller): In addition to the features provided by the Basic plan, you’ll gain access to extended limits and 50,000 monthly requests.

Business: This plan gives you everything from the Professional plan but increases your request limit to 250,000 requests per month.

Enterprise: Still need more? This plan gives you custom pricing tailored to your needs.

Conclusion

The aviationstack API was built to provide accurate real-time and historical flight data for flights around the globe. Thousands of companies around the world trust aviationstack to serve data for their flight booking platforms, visualization programs, flight monitoring applications, and other services in the aviation space. It’s built upon a rock-solid cloud infrastructure, allowing it to handle billions of requests with near 100% uptime.

Register for a free API and try it today!