Every team that builds on flight data hits the same fork early: to keep the data fresh, do you poll the API on a schedule, or wire up webhooks and let updates get pushed to you? The instinct from web development is "webhooks are modern, polling is wasteful" — but flight data breaks that intuition. This is a walkthrough of when each pattern fits, why real-time tracking is inherently polling-shaped, and the caching, rate-limit, and refresh-interval patterns that make either one work.
The two patterns, quickly
- Polling — your system asks the API "what's the current state?" on a fixed or adaptive interval. You control the cadence; you pay for every call whether or not anything changed.
- Webhooks — you register a URL, and the provider pushes an HTTP request to you when a defined event occurs. You pay (in requests) only when something happens — but you need a public endpoint, retry handling, and a provider that offers them.
The web-app world defaults to webhooks because most of its data is event-shaped: an order is placed, a payment clears, a comment is posted. Flight data is different, and the difference decides your architecture.
Why live tracking is polling-shaped
Here's the key insight: an aircraft's position isn't an event — it's a continuously changing value. A plane at cruise updates its latitude, longitude, and altitude every few seconds, forever. There's no discrete "the aircraft moved" event to push; it's always moving. Trying to model that as webhooks would mean firing one on every position report — thousands of aircraft times a push every few seconds — which is just polling with extra steps and worse backpressure.
So for ADS-B position tracking, polling is the correct pattern, not a compromise. You pull the current snapshot on an interval tuned to how fast the data actually moves. Webhooks come into their own for the discrete events layered on top of tracking — a flight changing status, departing, or landing — which we'll get to.
Getting polling right
Naive polling (hammer the endpoint in a tight loop) burns your quota and adds no freshness. Three patterns make it efficient:
Tune the interval to the data's volatility. Different feeds change at different rates, and polling faster than the source updates is pure waste:
| Data type | Changes | Sensible poll interval |
|---|---|---|
| ADS-B positions | every few seconds | 5–15 s |
| Flight status (gate, times) | minutes | 1–5 min |
| FAA delay programs | with little notice | 2–5 min |
| Airport schedules | slowly | 5–15 min |
Cache on your server, not per client. If a thousand users watch a live map, they should cost you one upstream call per interval, not a thousand. Put a short-TTL cache in front of the API keyed by request, so concurrent readers share a single fetch — a pattern we use for the very live counter on our "how many planes" page, which serves every visitor from one cached upstream call.
Adapt the cadence. Poll a flight fast when it matters and slow when it doesn't — a departure that's 36 hours out barely changes, while one pushing back in 20 minutes changes constantly. Scaling the interval to time-until-event cuts calls dramatically without hurting freshness.
Where webhooks fit: the poll-to-push bridge
Most flight-data APIs (SkyLink included) expose polling endpoints, not outbound webhooks — because, as above, the underlying tracking data isn't event-shaped. But your own users often want push, not poll. The standard pattern is a poll-to-webhook bridge: your backend polls the API efficiently, detects the discrete changes that matter (status flipped to "delayed," aircraft crossed a geofence, flight landed), and emits your own webhooks or push notifications to your subscribers.
This is exactly the architecture behind a flight delay notification system — poll status on a curve, diff against last-known state, fan out notifications on meaningful changes only — and behind detecting takeoffs and landings from ADS-B, where a poller turns a stream of positions into discrete "took off" / "landed" events. You consume flight data by polling; you serve your users by pushing.
Choosing, in one paragraph
If you need the current position or state of aircraft, poll — with server-side caching and volatility-tuned, adaptive intervals. If you need to react to discrete events (delays, departures, landings), build a poll-to-push bridge that watches the polled data and emits your own events. Don't wait for a tracking API to offer position webhooks; that's not how continuously-changing telemetry wants to be delivered. Get the polling layer right — cache it, tune it, respect the rate limits — and the real-time experience your users feel is entirely in your hands.
SkyLink API is built for exactly this: efficient polling endpoints for ADS-B, flight status, and FAA delays, with a free tier of 1,000 requests/month to prototype your polling-and-caching layer against and paid plans from $19/mo for production. It's available through the free trial — sign up, grab a key, and build the real-time layer the right way.