Delay in arrivals

Hi there,

I am working on a data visualisation/sonification of (close to) real-time arrivals and departures at various airports, so I am using the arrival and departure endpoints.

I am hitting the arrival/departure endpoints with a window of the current time minus 15 minutes.

The departure endpoint is fine, I am getting up-to-date results for every airport. However when I hit the arrivals endpoint, I always get an empty result set.

For example, here is the departures endpoint with a range of 1 hour between 2:06pm and 3:06pm at Sydney airport.

opensky-network.org/api/flights/departur...92775&end=1543896375

However, the arrivals endpoint for the same period returns nothing. (At least, as of 3:09pm on December 4).

opensky-network.org/api/flights/arrival?...92775&end=1543896375

If I extend that to 3 hours, still empty.
opensky-network.org/api/flights/arrival?...85575&end=1543896375

If I extend it further to 5 and a half hours, I get some results - with the most recent last seen timestamp being 1543880963 (or 10:49AM GMT +11).

opensky-network.org/api/flights/arrival?...80175&end=1543896375

So my question is, is there a delay on the arrivals data? Is this a bug? Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you in advance!
David

Hi struct,

the current implementation of the arrival / departure detection only detects departures as soon as the aircraft takes off again. So if it arrives, stays on ground for 1h and then takes off again, the arrival will show up only after 1h. Since most aircraft stay on ground longer than 15 minutes you're getting the empty result set. I'd like to explain it to you in more detail, but that's all I know for now. So no, you're not doing anything wrong, that's just the way arrival detection currently works.

Best,
Marco

Hi Marco

Thanks for that, understood. Do you think there will be an update to the way this is processed to get it closer to real-time? For now I'll just remove arrivals from my application.

Hi struct,

our heuristics also depend on the coverage of receivers next to airports, which is something we can barely influence. We haven't found a way to make it much better without flight plans. So, for the time being I wouldn't bet on great improvement.

Best,
Markus