canonical: https://jentic.com/apis/flightradar24.com/flightradar24

# Flightradar24 API

Jentic publishes the only available OpenAPI specification for Flightradar24 API, keeping it validated and agent-ready. The Flightradar24 API exposes real-time and historical flight tracking data including live flight positions, flight summaries, flight tracks, flight events, airline lookups, and airport metadata. Historical data is available from May 11, 2016 onward, and the API splits most resources into 'light' and 'full' variants so that bandwidth-sensitive callers can pull a smaller payload while richer integrations get the full record.

## For AI agents

Look up live and historical flight positions, flight summaries, flight tracks, and airline and airport metadata across Flightradar24's tracking corpus.

## Scope

Does not handle ticket booking, seat selection, or airline customer service - use for live and historical flight tracking, summaries, and airline or airport metadata only.

## Capabilities

- Pull live flight positions worldwide with light or full payload variants
- Query historical flight positions back to May 11, 2016 with the same light or full variants
- Retrieve flight summaries by flight, callsign, route, or registration
- Read the recorded flight track for a specific flight including timestamps and altitude
- Look up airline metadata by ICAO code and airport metadata by airport code
- Read your account's API usage stats to manage billing and quota

## Use cases

### Live flight tracking dashboard

Travel apps and operations teams build live flight tracking dashboards by polling /api/live/flight-positions/light or /api/live/flight-positions/full. The light variant keeps bandwidth low for map overlays, while the full variant adds aircraft type, airline, registration, and route detail for richer detail panes. Combined with /api/static/airlines and /api/static/airports lookups, this drives a complete arrivals or departures board.

Example prompt: Fetch live full flight positions inside a bounding box covering the UK and return aircraft callsign, type, altitude, and ground speed for each result

### Historical flight analysis

Analysts reconstruct past flights by querying /api/historic/flight-positions and /api/flight-tracks for any date back to May 11, 2016. The historical event endpoints add takeoff, landing, and diversion markers so that delay-cause analysis, accident investigations, and academic research can rebuild a flight's timeline minute by minute.

Example prompt: Pull the full flight track for a specific aircraft registration on 2024-08-12 and return latitude, longitude, altitude, and timestamp for each point

### Airline operations reporting

Airlines and ground handlers pull /api/flight-summary/full and /api/historic/flight-events to assemble daily on-time performance reports, delay attributions, and route utilization summaries. The light and count variants of the same endpoints support efficient totals queries before drilling into the full record.

Example prompt: Get the count and full flight summaries for airline ICAO BAW on 2024-12-01 and group results by departure airport

### AI agent travel disruption assistant

An AI travel agent uses Flightradar24 through Jentic to look up the current position of a passenger's flight, check whether it has diverted using the historic flight events feed, and explain expected delay times. Jentic returns the right Flightradar24 operation per intent, so the same agent skill handles live and historical questions without extra code paths.

Example prompt: Given flight number AA100 today, return its live position, ground speed, and any diversion event in the last 6 hours

## Key endpoints

| Method | Path | Description |
| --- | --- | --- |
| GET | /api/live/flight-positions/full | Live aircraft positions with full record |
| GET | /api/live/flight-positions/light | Live aircraft positions with reduced payload |
| GET | /api/historic/flight-positions/full | Historical aircraft positions back to 2016 |
| GET | /api/flight-summary/full | Per-flight summary records with full detail |
| GET | /api/flight-tracks | Recorded flight track for a specific flight |
| GET | /api/historic/flight-events/full | Historical flight event markers |
| GET | /api/static/airlines/{icao}/light | Airline metadata lookup by ICAO code |
| GET | /api/usage | Read account API usage and quota stats |

## Key resources

- **Live Flight Positions** — Real-time aircraft positions in light, full, and count variants
- **Historic Flight Positions** — Historical aircraft positions back to May 11, 2016 in light, full, and count variants
- **Flight Summary** — Per-flight summary records with light, full, and count variants
- **Flight Tracks** — Recorded flight track points for a specific flight
- **Historic Flight Events** — Takeoff, landing, diversion, and other historical event markers
- **Airlines and Airports** — Static lookups for airline and airport metadata by ICAO code

## Why Jentic

- **Setup:** Wiring the Flightradar24 API by hand means setting its bearer auth, choosing between light, full, and historic variants for each query, and handling retries and rate limits yourself. Through Jentic you install once, import Flightradar24 from the API Directory, store the token once, and your agent calls it.
- **Permission scoping:** Flightradar24 exposes read-only tracking and metadata queries whose parameters travel in the query string rather than as an owned resource in the URL path, so limit the agent to the operations it needs, such as live flight positions or flight summaries, and leave the rest out of the allowed set. You choose which of the 16 operations it may call.
- **Credential handling:** Your Flightradar24 token is stored once, encrypted, by your own Jentic One instance and injected into the Authorization header at execution time. It never enters the agent's prompt, logs, or context.
- **Discovery method:** Agents search Jentic by intent such as 'track a live flight' or 'get a flight summary', and Jentic returns the matching Flightradar24 operation with its input schema so the agent calls the right variant without browsing the reference docs.

## Related APIs

- **AviationData API** — AviationData is an alternative provider of flight tracking and aircraft reference data
- **Amadeus On-Demand Flight Status API** — Amadeus handles booking and ticketing while Flightradar24 supplies the live tracking signal
- **Google Calendar API** — Google Calendar holds the user's trip itinerary that the live tracking signal updates

## FAQ

### Why is there no official OpenAPI spec for Flightradar24 API?

Flightradar24 does not publish an OpenAPI specification. Jentic generates and maintains this spec so that AI agents and developers can call Flightradar24 API via structured tooling. It is validated against the live API and kept up to date. Get started with Jentic One, the self-hosted execution layer.

### What authentication does the Flightradar24 API use?

The Flightradar24 API uses HTTP bearer tokens issued from your fr24api.flightradar24.com account. Through Jentic the token is held in the encrypted vault and injected into the Authorization header at execution time.

### How far back does Flightradar24 historical data go?

Historical flight positions, summaries, tracks, and events are available from May 11, 2016 onward. Queries for earlier dates return no records.

### Can I get the live position of a specific flight?

Yes. Call /api/live/flight-positions/full or /api/live/flight-positions/light with filters such as callsign or registration to return the live record for that aircraft.

### What are the rate limits for the Flightradar24 API?

Quotas are tied to your Flightradar24 plan rather than a fixed global limit. Use /api/usage to monitor remaining credits and watch for 429 responses with Retry-After headers.

### How do I track a live flight through Jentic?

Search Jentic for 'track a live flight', load the schema for /api/live/flight-positions/full, and execute the call with the flight identifier. Install with pip install jentic and run it through Jentic One, the self-hosted execution layer.

### What is the difference between the light and full variants?

Light variants return a compact payload optimised for map overlays and high-volume polling. Full variants return the same records with airline, aircraft type, registration, and route detail attached.

### Can I limit what my agent is allowed to do with the Flightradar24 API?

Yes. Because you run Jentic One yourself, your own rules decide which of the 16 read-only Flightradar24 operations the agent may call and which credentials it may use. You can allow just the ones a task needs, such as live flight positions or flight summaries, and leave the rest, like historic flight events, airline lookups, or the account usage endpoint, out of the allowed set. Since these are all read-only tracking and metadata queries with parameters in the query string, scoping the operation list is what controls what the agent can reach.