Track Flights With This API  John Musser Aug. 24 2007, 01:21AM
EDT  One of the more unique APIs listed here lately is the
FlightAware API. It's a commercial SOAP based API for live and
historical flight data. As of the other day, the home page notes
"Tracking 5,163 airborne aircraft with 49,337,567 total flights
in the database. FlightAware has tracked 38,249 arrivals in the
last 24 hours." Here's some details:    What's also interesting
is the pricing model:  FlightXML is priced on a volume-basis
with a per-transaction fee. There are three classes of
transactions based on the complexity of the request. The more
queries that a user account makes per month, the less the per-
query fee is.  The classes of queries separate the most complex
queries for FlightAware to deliver from the more simple queries.
For example, requesting a list of aircraft en route to LAX would
be a higher class query than requesting the name and location of
an airport. Requesting the heading of an aircraft based on two
positions would be a