Everything You Need To Build A Real-time Flight Status App
Would you like to create an application with real-time flight status & global Aviation data updated as often as every single minute? Whether it’s building booking platforms, visualizing and monitoring global flights or creating popular flight tracking applications, wouldn’t it be nice to have a free, simple REST API for live flight tracking & airport timetable data? You’ve probably used one already and, if you’re like me you’ve found a few of them a little lacking and thought “I could do that” – well, now you can! How to build a flight status app with as little code as possible In this article we will see how fast and easy it is to use RAD Studio and Delphi to create a FireMonkey multidevice application using the LowCode Wizard in addition to a REST client library to take advantage of AviationStack API and retrieve a JSON format response for worldwide Live Flight tracker & airport timetable data. What is the AviationStack API? The AviationStack API offers instant access to live extensive set of aviation data, including real-time flight status, historical flights, schedules, airline routes, airports, aircrafts from 250+ countries and 13.000+ airlines from all around the world. This is possible to be done for free (up to first 500 calls/month; no credit card required) and much more is available at very affordable prices and scalable to the use you make with no upfront commitments. Our RAD Studio and Delphi applications will be able to call the API and request information based on the name of parameters you provide. How do I set up the AviationStack API? Make sure you refer to AviationStack API website (https://aviationStack.com/) and and SignUp for the free Plan providing only your email and some basic information (no credit card required). Once you are in the website will redirect you to a Quickstart guide dashboard and your API Access Key will be provided. The Access Key unique, personal and is required to authenticate with the API. Keep it safe! How do I call AviationStack API endpoints? Now all we need to do is to call the API base URL (http://api.aviationStack.com/) via a HTTP POST method with no JSON request body needed and some few requested parameters added to the URL address depending on the ednpoint we choose to call. One can do that using REST Client libraries available on several programming languages. AviationStack offers several API endpoints to choose from: Real-Time Flights: Look up flights in real-time Historical Flights: Look up historical flights Airline Routes: Look up airline routes Airports: Look up global airports Airlines: Look up global airlines Airplanes: Look up airplanes/aircrafts Aircraft Types: Look up aircraft types Aviation Taxes: Look up aviation taxes Cities: Look up global cities Countries: Look up countries Our demo will focus on the Real Time Flights Endpoint but all the others follow similar logic but with different parameters passed. For a complete and detailed list of endpoints and its parameters make sure you refer to AviationStack Quickstart guide (https://aviationStack.com/quickstart) // Real-Time Flights (For the free subscription the request should be done using http and not https in the link below) https://api.aviationstack.com/v1/flights ? access_key = YOUR_ACCESS_KEY // optional parameters: & limit = 100 & offset = 0 // more parameters available please refer to the API Documentation (https://aviationstack.com/documentation) // Real-Time Flights (For […]
