Data returned by flight in time interval API call

brinknr
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2 years 1 month ago #2127 by brinknr

Data returned by flight in time interval API call was created by brinknr

Hello everybody,

My question is related to the flight-in-time-interval API call, for which the given time interval
must not be larger than two hours.

It seems that it only returns flights that have started and ended within the given time interval.
Flights for which either the start or end of the flight is outside the time interval, appear not
to be captured, meaning that flights that last longer than two hours will not be returned by the
API call. This has been checked comparing API data with monthly COVid dataset data.

Is this API behaviour implemented on purpose, and, if yes, is there a way to find all (historical)
flights that ended in a time interval?

Thanks in advance,

jluebbe
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1 year 10 months ago #2226 by jluebbe

Replied by jluebbe on topic Data returned by flight in time interval API call

I observe the same behaviour. Maybe the solution would be to use start and end as constraints for the first point of the flight only.

steve25070
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1 year 3 months ago #2545 by steve25070

Replied by steve25070 on topic Data returned by flight in time interval API call

I am running into this same issue. And to be honest, it surprises me that this topic has not had any real feedback in 10 months even though the issue is still outstanding.
Are there any plans to fix this endpoint so that it is not limited to flights lasting < 2hours?

Thank you.

strohmeier
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Administrator

1 year 3 months ago #2546 by strohmeier

Replied by strohmeier on topic Data returned by flight in time interval API call

The implementation was intentional - we can fix the documentation, if it is unclear somewhere?

steve25070
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1 year 3 months ago #2547 by steve25070

Replied by steve25070 on topic Data returned by flight in time interval API call

I would argue that the whole endpoint is useless if there is an arbitrary limit of reporting only flights which lasted less than 2 hours.

But, if that is the intention and there are good usecases for this endpoint out there; I would certainly clarify this in the docs.
Some comments regarding the REST docs for this particular endpoint ;

Description
Currently the description says;

This API call retrieves flights for a certain time interval [begin, end].

To me this does not fully describe how the interval setting limits the result. @Brinknr wording is more descriptive here;

It seems that it only returns flights that have started and ended within the given time interval.

Request parameters
Regarding the naming of the

begin

and

end

parameters. Since they seem to be targeting the

firstSeen

and

lastSeen

properties, it would be clearer to rename them to something akin to

minFirstSeen

and

maxLastSeen

. This would also immediately strike the relation between the properties and explain how they affect the results.

Response
The `Response` property list is empty. Luckily it is not hard to just call the endpoint and see the results in real life, but I guess this should still be fixed (or the paragraph removed).

Examples
The one example given has the following description

Get flights from 12pm to 1pm on Jan 29 2018:

I would read that as; anything that was in the air within that timeframe. However, instead it returns anything that has departed and landed within that timeframe, which is a subset of anything that was in the air at that time.