Airlines publish a status code and a label: A and "Active", L and "Landed", or a sentence like "Arrived / Gate Arrival". Codes differ between feeds, labels are for people, and neither says whether the aircraft has left the gate yet. A phase is the same information as a small, fixed vocabulary that code can branch on.
The phases
| Phase | Meaning |
|---|---|
scheduled | Not yet departed. The default from publication until something moves. |
boarding | Gate activity reported. |
departed | Left the gate, not yet airborne. |
en_route | Airborne. |
landed | On the runway, not yet at the gate. |
arrived | At the gate. The watch continues briefly for the baggage belt. |
cancelled | Cancelled. Can revert; flight.reinstated covers that. |
diverted | Landing at an airport other than the planned one. |
redirected | Re-routed before departure to a different destination. |
unknown | The upstream said nothing usable. Rare, and usually early. |
How a phase is derived
The upstream's letter codes map to phases, with the times filling in what the code leaves out. A ("active") is departed until an actual runway time exists, then en_route. L ("landed") is landed until an actual gate time exists, then arrived. S is scheduled, C is cancelled, D is diverted, R is redirected. That derivation is why the phase says more than the code: the same letter covers two things a passenger experiences as different.
In FlightByte
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
status.phase | One of the ten values above. Branch on this. |
status.code, status.label | The upstream's letter and wording, for display and debugging. |
status.delayed, status.cancelled, status.diverted | Booleans for the three questions asked most often. Delay is a flag on a phase, not a phase. |
status.changed fires whenever the code or the phase changes, carrying from and to. The lifecycle events flight.departed, flight.arrived, flight.cancelled, flight.diverted and flight.reinstated are the phase transitions most integrations act on, named so a subscription can ask for just those. See Flights → Phases.