Authenticate with your AeroAPI key via the Authorization header (value: YOUR_AEROAPI_KEY) on all requests to the base URL https://aeroapi.flightaware.com/aeroapi.
Call GET /airports/{id}/flights/departures or /arrivals with the ICAO or IATA airport code to retrieve the departure/arrival board for the airport; use the start and end query parameters to bound the time window.
For each flight in the response, inspect the actual_off / actual_on timestamps versus the scheduled_off / scheduled_on; compute the delay in minutes; flag flights where the delta exceeds your threshold.
For cancellations, check the cancelled boolean field on each flight object — a true value indicates the airline has cancelled the flight in AeroAPI's data.
To track a specific flight over time, use GET /flights/{ident} with the flight identifier (e.g., AA123) to retrieve the flight's current status, estimated times, and any diversion information.
Store the AeroAPI fa_flight_id as your canonical flight reference for subsequent queries — flight identifiers can be reused across dates, but fa_flight_id is unique per operation.
Known gotchas
AeroAPI v4 enforces per-minute and per-day rate limits depending on your subscription tier; implement exponential backoff and cache airport board responses for short TTLs rather than polling per flight.
The ident parameter accepts both IATA (e.g., AA123) and ICAO (AAL123) formats, but responses normalize to ICAO internally — ensure your downstream matching logic handles both formats.
AeroAPI's estimated arrival time is a predictive value that updates en-route; for compliance calculations (e.g., EU261 3-hour delay rule), use the actual_on timestamp only, which is populated after the flight lands.
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