Skip to main content

API Overview

The Airframes REST API provides access to aggregated and processed aviation data from our global network of ACARS receivers. Our API allows authorized users to query real-time and historical aircraft communications, flight data, and station information.

API Specification​

🚀 Interactive API Reference - Complete interactive API documentation with live testing capabilities.

📋 View OpenAPI Specification - Raw OpenAPI YAML specification file.

Authentication & Access​

All API requests require an API key. See the Authentication page for details on obtaining and using API keys.

There are two classifications of authorized API users:

Feeders​

Users who run a receiver that contributes data in real-time to Airframes with a measure of validated data will receive a minimal, yet useful, free API account.

Customers​

Paying users/subscribers will be able to access the API in relation to their subscription tier. Initially this will be a nominal fee with no feeder requirement.

See Pricing for current access tiers.

Available Endpoints​

Our API provides access to:

  • Flights - Active, live and historical flights, with events, messages and position trails
  • Routes - Flown tracks and great-circle routes (/airframes/flights/{id}/route, /airframes/routes)
  • Messages - ACARS messages, OOOI reports, and aircraft communications
  • ACARS / VDL / HFDL - Protocol-specific message and ground-station data
  • Decode - On-demand decoding of raw ACARS payloads
  • Airframes - Aircraft registration and type details (by id, tail, ICAO, IATA)
  • Airlines - Airline information and ICAO/IATA codes
  • Airports - Airport data and location (by id, ICAO, IATA, ident, type, bounding box)
  • Stations - Feeder station data, coverage and statistics
  • Leaderboard - Station rankings, hall of fame and awards
  • Stats - Platform, ACARS and frequency-usage statistics
  • Marine - AIS vessel and voyage tracking
  • Sonde - Radiosonde (weather balloon) flights and positions

Versioning​

All endpoints are served under the /v1 prefix (for example https://api.airframes.io/v1/flights). For backward compatibility the same endpoints also respond without the prefix, but /v1 is the documented, stable path and should be preferred for new integrations.

Conventions​

  • Authentication is optional on public data endpoints — they work anonymously, but sending your API key (Authorization: Bearer … or X-API-KEY) applies your tier's higher rate limits and attributes usage to your account.
  • Pagination — list endpoints accept limit/offset (or page/limit, or cursor before_id) and return X-Total-Count / X-Result-Count / X-Page / X-Per-Page / X-Total-Pages headers.
  • Time ranges — time-filtered endpoints accept since / until (ISO-8601).
  • Rate limits — X-RateLimit-Limit / X-RateLimit-Remaining / X-RateLimit-Reset (and Retry-After on 429). Every response includes an X-Request-ID.
  • Conditional requests — responses carry an ETag; send it back as If-None-Match to get a 304 Not Modified and save bandwidth.
  • Errors use a consistent shape: { statusCode, message, error, timestamp }.

Tooling​

The OpenAPI specification can be imported directly into Postman, Insomnia, or any OpenAPI 3 client to generate a ready-to-use request collection, or fed to an OpenAPI code generator to produce a client SDK in your language.

Getting Started​

  1. Browse the Interactive API Reference or the OpenAPI specification for detailed endpoint documentation
  2. Contact us for API access and authentication credentials
  3. Start making requests to the REST endpoints under /v1
  4. For live data, see Realtime / Streaming

Base URLs​

  • Production: https://api.airframes.io/v1
  • Staging: https://staging.airframes.io/v1

For more information about API access, please see our contact page.