Questions, answered

FlightNerve is the fastest way to add real-time flight data to your product. One API call returns a flight's live status, position, schedule, route and aircraft, worldwide, in a clean JSON response you can ship the same day.

Five endpoints, one key: track any flight by number, follow an aircraft's live position, look up 85,000+ airports, see every aircraft in an area or inbound to an airport, and resolve routes and schedules. Browse the full documentation.

Create an account, generate an API key, and make your first call in minutes, no credit card required. You can even track a flight straight from your console before writing a line of code. Get your key →

Start completely free with 1,000 calls and no card. From there, usage-based plans scale with your volume, you only pay for what you use. See pricing.

Any of them. It's a plain REST API returning JSON, so it works with any HTTP client, in any language, with no SDK to install. The API key travels as the first path segment, that's the only setup.

Yes, every request uses your key, and authentication couldn't be simpler: the key travels as the first segment of the URL path. No OAuth dances, no signed headers to implement. Keep your key server-side and you're set.

The free tier is your sandbox. You get real endpoints and real responses from your very first call, so what you build against is exactly what ships, with no separate test environment to reconcile later.

Real-time. Live positions refresh continuously and flight status updates as the journey unfolds, from scheduled, to airborne, to arrived. You always get the latest picture, plus projected times when a flight hasn't departed yet.

Thousands of airlines and airports across the globe. Explore the carriers we track on the Airlines page and destinations on the Airports page, every one comes with live tracking through the API.

Clean, predictable JSON with the same structure across every endpoint. Fields are always present, returning null when a value isn't published rather than disappearing, so your parser never breaks between requests. Point your client at us once and you're done. There's a live example in the docs.

Scheduled, estimated and actual times, each given two ways: a readable string local to the airport (like "11:20, Jul 20") and a full ISO-8601 timestamp with the correct UTC offset, so you can display it or compute with it directly.

Yes, when the airport publishes them: departure and arrival gate and terminal, plus the baggage belt on arrival, alongside actual gate-out, wheels-up and gate-in times.

The operating aircraft's type and code (for example "Airbus A380-800"), returned with the flight so you always know what's flying the route.

Human-friendly, aviation-standard units: altitude in feet, ground speed in knots, vertical rate in feet per minute, and coordinates in decimal degrees. Times and durations come pre-formatted so you can display them as-is.

Scheduled is the published timetable time; estimated is the current best prediction, updated as the flight progresses; and actual is what really happened once the event occurs, gate-out, wheels-up, touchdown and gate-in. You get all three, so you can show a plan, a live estimate and the record.

Well beyond today. Ask for a future date and you get the projected schedule for that day, built from the flight's operating pattern, including an honest signal when a flight simply doesn't run on the date you picked.

FlightNerve is flight-operations data: status, position, schedule, route, aircraft, airports and airspace. It is not a booking, fares or seat-map product, and it holds no passenger or personal data. That focus is exactly why it stays fast, clean and easy to integrate.

Some flight numbers cover two sectors in one day. Ask for the number and you get every leg, each with its own origin, destination and live status. Need just one leg? Pin it by its departure airport and we return only that segment, perfect for pickups versus drop-offs.

Plenty of flights operate different times on different days, or skip some days entirely. FlightNerve learns each flight's day-of-week pattern and projects upcoming dates accordingly. When a flight doesn't operate on the day you ask about, we tell you plainly instead of guessing.

Yes. The same endpoint answers for past, present and future dates: final recorded times for completed flights, live tracking for today, and projected schedules for upcoming dates.

It's surfaced as the real status, Delayed, Cancelled or Diverted, with updated estimates where available. We don't hide disruptions or pretend a cancelled flight is still scheduled.

You get a clean empty result, and you pay nothing for it. Live positions start flowing the moment the flight is in the air, whether it hasn't departed yet, already landed, or you asked for a past or future date.

We resolve to the operating carrier and airport that's actually flying, and we don't surface airlines that have ceased operating, so pages and lookups reflect live networks rather than stale records.

Yes. List every aircraft currently inbound to an airport with a live ETA, or every aircraft flying within a point, radius or bounding box, in a single call.

Three ways: by IATA or ICAO code, by name or city search, or by nearest to a latitude and longitude, complete with coordinates and time zone.

Simply: one credit per successful call. A multi-leg lookup counts one per leg returned, and an empty live-position response (a flight that isn't airborne) costs nothing. Errors don't count against you.

Typically sub-second. Every plan has generous limits to keep things fast for everyone; paid plans raise them to match sustained production traffic.

Yes. Resolve the route for a flight, or list every flight between two airports, with the route endpoint, and use the airspace endpoint to see live traffic around or inbound to an airport. Ideal when you know the city pair but not the number.

Absolutely. Track individual flights with one call each (poll them adaptively to keep volume low), or pull an entire area, airport or inbound board in a single airspace call when you need the big picture rather than one aircraft.

From your console, in seconds. You hold one active key at a time; revoke it to cut off access immediately and issue a fresh one. Rotating is a two-click operation whenever you need it.

Yes, a lightweight health check you can ping to confirm the service is up and wire into your own monitoring, so you always know the API is ready before you depend on it.

It's built for it: fast responses, a stable schema, and resilient infrastructure engineered to keep serving even when an individual upstream has a bad day. Teams run real products on it.

Yes. Paid plans (Starter, Growth, Scale) add flight monitoring, webhooks for status and delay events and higher limits; Scale and Enterprise add uptime targets and priority or dedicated support. See pricing or tell us what you need.

Reach the team any time via the contact page. We read every message and love helping developers ship faster.