A flight route API that knows where each aircraft is going

Raw flight tracking gives you a dot and a callsign. Flight Data puts the origin and destination on the same object as the live position, with a number that says how sure it is — no second lookup, no timetable to match against.

What the route is

Every aircraft in the feed carries a route with an origin and a destination airport, a confidence between 0 and 1, and the basis it was worked out from. The route is observed: it comes from where the aircraft actually took off and how it flies, not from a published schedule.

That makes it honest about what it does not know. A confidence of 0.86 says something different from 0.4, and you decide where your display draws the line. Under the current model, the served route matched the route actually flown 75.4 % of the time.

GET /v1/aircraft/3c6589 example

{
  "icao24": "3c6589",
  "callsign": "DLH4AB",
  "type": { "icao": "A319", "class": "L2J" },
  "operator": { "icao": "DLH", "name": "Lufthansa" },
  "position": { "lat": 50.96, "lon": 10.54, "alt_ft": 21400 },
  "state": "descent",
  "route": {
    "origin": "EDDB",
    "destination": "EDDF",
    "confidence": 0.86,
    "basis": "observed_departure"
  }
}

Two ways to ask

On the aircraft

Ask for an area — a bounding box, or a point and a radius — or for one airframe by its ICAO 24-bit address, and the route comes with every aircraft in the answer. One call can also return the whole world: every 30 s on Developer, as often as you ask on Pro.

By callsign

GET /v1/routes/{callsign} returns the observed route for a callsign. Pass the aircraft’s lat and lon as well and the answer is refined by where the aircraft actually is — useful when you already have positions from your own receiver and only need to know where they are going.

Live

Live updates are pushed over one open connection for the areas you subscribe to, every 5 s on Hobby and every 2 s on Developer, and for the whole world every 5 s on Pro — route included.

What it is not

Not a timetable. There are no scheduled departure or arrival times, gates or delays; the route is what the aircraft is observed doing.
Not every aircraft. The feed comes from ground receivers: around 6,000 aircraft at any moment worldwide, densest over Europe. No satellite, no MLAT.
Not always certain. That is what the confidence is for — a route the model is unsure of says so.

What it costs

From €5 a month on Hobby (billed yearly), €15 on Developer, €49 on Pro. Every plan returns the route with its confidence and allows commercial use, and you pay per call, not per aircraft returned. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial. All plans

Early means three months free.

Waitlist offer: three months free with yearly billing, and 10 % off Developer or 20 % off Pro for as long as you keep the plan.