Release date: 9 May 2025

Overview

The Air Cargo set of features has a crucial expansion in the shape of the Air Cargo telemetry API, a new offering that reduces the latency of Arrival and Departure event tracking in the Portcast platform and allows users to access near-real-time latest position and observed route for their Air cargo shipment.

Feature description

The Master Airway Bill (MAWB) tracking feature allows Portcast platform users to track the latest information for Air Cargo shipments for a wide range of carriers around the world. This is a growing request from our customers, either looking to exclusively track this type of shipment, or combining them with ocean shipments - a major feature of our platform.

This new feature targets a specific need in the air shipment tracking market; customers looking to track air shipments in any platform are often finding issues related to the latency with which carriers publish air cargo milestone events in their tracking platforms. This means that for many air shipment customers, the speed at which they are informed of the arrival of their shipments is not updated fast enough.

In order to address this issue, Portcast has developed and is actively offering an upgrade to the baseline Air Cargo shipment tracking, in the form of flight telemetry data. This is a major upgrade that consists of the following components:

• Ingestion of near real-time flight tracking data for customers subscribing to the Air Cargo telemetry feature;
• Monitoring of takeoff and landing for every flight in the MAWB’s flight plan which, in turn, updates newly available fields in the events list and dynamically adjusts the status of the MAWB in the Portcast platform. This is done via an additional entry called actual_from_telemetry that sits alongside the carrier provided Arrival and Departure events. If the carrier has not yet provided these events, Portcast can backfill based on flight takeoff and landing information;
• Latest position information included in the main MAWB tracking API endpoint, allowing customers to know where the flights carrying the shipment currently are with minimal latency (refresh rates can be set depending on the customers’ needs and start at minimum every 30 mins);
• Addition of a new Air Cargo endpoint that returns the actual observed route undertaken by the different aircrafts carrying the MAWB;
• Delivery via GET calls (on request updates) or via PUSH API - users subscribing to the telemetry upgrade will receive both MAWB information and route information on the callback URL of their choice.

Who’s Impacted?

Impacted users by this range of features include every customer interested in tracking air cargo shipments with reduced latency and looking for an upgrade from simple carrier event milestone tracking.

Useful resources

• API documentation on subscribing to a new MAWB shipment tracking and fetching information for a tracked shipment
• API documentation on fetching the route information for an actively tracked MAWB