Authenticate requests to the FlightAware AeroAPI (api.flightaware.com) using your API key in the x-apikey request header.
To retrieve live flight status, call the /flights/{ident} endpoint where ident is the ICAO-format flight identifier (e.g., UAL123); parse the status field and estimated times for departure and arrival.
Subscribe to flight events by polling the /flights/{ident}/track endpoint or by registering a push endpoint via the /push rules API to receive real-time position and status updates.
For proactive disruption monitoring across a set of bookings, iterate over your tracked flight IDs and compare estimated departure/arrival times against original scheduled times; flag delays exceeding a threshold (e.g., 45 minutes).
When a cancellation event is detected (status = 'cancelled'), trigger your rebooking workflow and notify the traveler via your preferred channel.
Normalize all timestamps to UTC on ingestion and store the IANA timezone for each airport separately for local-time display.
Known gotchas
The AeroAPI has tiered rate limits per plan; high-volume tracking of many simultaneous flights requires a commercial plan and careful request batching.
Flight identifiers can be ambiguous when an airline operates codeshares — always use the operating carrier's identifier, not the marketing carrier, for accurate tracking.
Estimated arrival times are updated frequently; do not cache them for more than a few minutes, and always display a 'last updated' timestamp to users.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp