Introduction

Description

Spire Aviation Flights Live is a light-weight API which delivers real-time flight data in JSON via a REST endpoint.

In contrast to the Spire Tracking Stream API, this REST alternative serves up just one JSON object per flight request in real-time, each identified by a unique flight ID.

Flights Live API benefits from extensive development to Spire Aviation’s flight detection algorithm to condense hundreds of millions of ADS-B messages in real-time for a rich combination of flight, aircraft, airline, airport and schedule metadata in only one JSON object.

About ADS-B

The ADS-B capable aircraft transponders emit several messages with different bits of information several times per second. Spire’s satellites collect these messages that are processed into a Target Update, which corresponds to an update for each ICAO address for each 5-second interval.