distance to airports

Hello,

I'm playing with your API and it looks really good.

Unfortunately. I have a problem to understand some of the data:
- estDepartureAirportHorizDistance
- estArrivalAirportHorizDistance

The documentation is saying it is:
"Horizontal/vertical distance of the last received airborne position to the estimated arrival/departure airport in meters"

But when I take a look at example data, it doesn't make sense, for example:

{
"icao24": "3c648b",
"firstSeen": 1517328420,
"estDepartureAirport": "EDDM",
"lastSeen": 1517330769,
"estArrivalAirport": "EDDF",
"callsign": "DLH2LC ",
"estDepartureAirportHorizDistance": 1638,
"estDepartureAirportVertDistance": 133,
"estArrivalAirportHorizDistance": 2016,
"estArrivalAirportVertDistance": 95,
"departureAirportCandidatesCount": 1,
"arrivalAirportCandidatesCount": 3
}

This plane is flying from Munich to Frankfurt, and the data is saying that it is 1638 meters from Munich and 2016 meters from Franfurkt, that obviously doesn't make any sense.

Could you please help me understand how to read this data?

Hi,
the estDepartureAirportHorizDistance is the distance between the estimated departure airport (Munich) and the first position where this flight was detected by OpenSky Network. The estArrivalAirportHorizDistance is the distance between the last position where the flight and the destination airport position. Values of a few 1000 meters mean, that this flight was tracked nearly until it landed on the runway. If this value is much larger, it is uncertain that the correct airport has been estimated.

However, the route for callsign DLH2LC changed to EDDT-EDDF as LH191 with 2019 summer schedule. Did you perform your API request using a certain date/time?

Hey,

Thank you for your answer!

I cannot find a request that returned me data from my previous post, but please take a look at another example:

If I read this data correctly based on your previous answer:
Plane DLH3XN was first detected 3312m from Munich airport and his last position to Frankfurt airport is 1050 so it is already landed on the runway.

What I don't understand is why max(estArrivalAirportHorizDistance) is just 24061m (24km)

jluebbe wrote:

Hi,
the estDepartureAirportHorizDistance is the distance between the estimated departure airport (Munich) and the first position where this flight was detected by OpenSky Network. The estArrivalAirportHorizDistance is the distance between the last position where the flight and the destination airport position. Values of a few 1000 meters mean, that this flight was tracked nearly until it landed on the runway. If this value is much larger, it is uncertain that the correct airport has been estimated.

This is excellent information. Is explained so well in the documentation?