Air cargo tracking explained for developers. How to track cargo flights by aircraft and flight number, identify cargo airlines, follow freighter routes and positions, and access air cargo data through the AirLabs flight data API.
Air cargo is the invisible backbone of global commerce. Every day, thousands of freighter aircraft and the cargo holds of passenger jets move electronics, pharmaceuticals, perishables and e-commerce parcels between continents. For the companies that depend on this movement — freight forwarders, logistics platforms, shippers and consignees — knowing where a shipment is matters as much as it does for a passenger tracking their own flight.
It is worth being precise about what air cargo tracking means at the flight data level, because the term is used loosely. There are two distinct layers:
These two layers connect at a single point: the flight the shipment is loaded onto. Once you know which flight (or which aircraft) is carrying a consignment, flight-level tracking tells you where that cargo physically is, when it will land, and whether it is delayed. This is exactly the approach modern logistics platforms take — they track shipments by following the aircraft carrying them.
This guide explains how to do that with documented AirLabs endpoints: how to identify cargo airlines and freighters, follow a cargo flight's live position and schedule, analyze freighter route networks, and build proactive cargo monitoring. It also states clearly where the boundary lies — what flight data does and does not cover — so you can design around it honestly.
"You do not track a pallet with a flight API — you track the aircraft it is sitting in. The waybill tells you which flight; the flight data tells you where that flight is, when it lands, and whether it is running late. For most logistics use cases, that is the visibility the customer actually wants."
The starting point for any cargo-tracking workflow is identifying which carriers and aircraft are operating freight. AirLabs provides this directly in its reference databases.
The Airlines Database carries an is_cargo flag on each airline record, alongside is_passenger, is_scheduled and is_international. This lets you distinguish dedicated freight operators and carriers that run cargo services from purely passenger airlines.
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/airlines?iata_code=FX&api_key={KEY}
[{
"name": "FedEx Express",
"iata_code": "FX",
"icao_code": "FDX",
"callsign": "FEDEX",
"country_code": "US",
"is_scheduled": 1,
"is_passenger": 0,
"is_cargo": 1,
"is_international": 1,
"total_aircrafts": 694
}]Here the record shows a carrier that is cargo-only (is_cargo: 1, is_passenger: 0) — a pure freight operator. A combination carrier would show both flags set, because it moves freight in the bellies of passenger aircraft as well as on dedicated freighters. Note that the is_cargo flag describes the airline, not an individual flight: a passenger airline with is_cargo: 1 carries belly cargo on flights that also carry passengers, so the flag tells you a carrier participates in air freight, not that a specific flight is freight-only.
At the aircraft level, the Fleets Database resolves a registration or ICAO 24-bit hex code to the aircraft type and model. Freighter variants are identifiable by their type designators — a Boeing 747-8F or 777F, for example — which lets you confirm that a given airframe is a dedicated freighter rather than a passenger aircraft.
Once you know the flight or the aircraft carrying a shipment, following it live uses the same mechanism as any flight tracking: the Real-Time Flights API, which delivers ADS-B-derived position data enriched with airline, aircraft and route metadata. A freighter broadcasts its position exactly as a passenger jet does, so a cargo flight is fully trackable.
You can query by the cargo flight number, or by the specific aircraft if you know its registration or hex:
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/flights?airline_iata=FX&api_key={KEY}
[{
"hex": "A12F4C",
"reg_number": "N850FD",
"flag": "US",
"lat": 35.0641,
"lng": -89.9773,
"alt": 10363,
"dir": 65,
"speed": 880,
"v_speed": 0,
"flight_iata": "FX1228",
"flight_icao": "FDX1228",
"dep_iata": "MEM",
"arr_iata": "CDG",
"airline_iata": "FX",
"aircraft_icao": "B77L",
"status": "en-route"
}]This single response gives a shipper everything they need to locate the cargo physically: the freighter is en-route from Memphis to Paris, currently at cruise over the eastern United States, on a Boeing 777 Freighter. The reg_number and hex identify the exact airframe, so if a forwarder knows a shipment is on tail number N850FD, they can follow that aircraft directly.
For map-based logistics dashboards, the bbox parameter returns all flights within a geographic bounding box (bbox=south_lat,west_lng,north_lat,east_lng), which is the efficient way to render only the freighters in a region the user is viewing rather than pulling the global feed.
Live position answers "where is it now"; cargo logistics also needs "when does it land". The Schedules API provides the live departures and arrivals board for an airport, including scheduled, estimated and actual times plus a per-flight status — and freighter movements appear on it alongside passenger flights.
Filtering an airport's arrivals board by a cargo carrier shows inbound freight and its timing:
GET https://airlabs.co/api/v9/schedules?arr_iata=CDG&airline_iata=FX&api_key={KEY}
[{
"flight_iata": "FX1228",
"dep_iata": "MEM",
"arr_iata": "CDG",
"arr_terminal": "2",
"arr_time": "2026-06-24 08:40",
"arr_estimated": "2026-06-24 09:05",
"status": "en-route",
"delayed": 25
}]For a ground-handling team or a consignee waiting on a delivery, the estimated arrival time and the 25-minute delay are the operationally important values — they determine when the freight will actually be available for collection and onward distribution. The Flight Information API provides the same detail for a single cargo flight number when you want to look up one specific movement rather than a whole board.
Beyond tracking individual flights, cargo analytics often needs the structural picture: which freight routes a carrier operates, and which carriers serve a given lane. The Routes Database provides this, returning the airlines that operate a route and the days each service runs.
Filtering routes by a cargo airline reveals its network; filtering by a city pair reveals which carriers — including freight operators — connect two airports. This supports capacity planning, lane analysis and carrier selection: a logistics team evaluating how to move freight between two regions can see which operators fly the lane and how frequently, rather than guessing.
Combined with the Airports Database, which resolves airport codes to full names, cities, countries and coordinates, route data lets you build a complete map of an air freight network — origins, destinations, operators and frequencies — entirely from documented endpoints.
Polling a position endpoint repeatedly is workable but inefficient for monitoring many shipments. The Flight Alert API supports webhook-based notifications that fire when a tracked flight changes status — a better fit for logistics platforms that need to react to events rather than constantly check.
For cargo monitoring, this means a platform can subscribe to the flights carrying its shipments and receive a push when a freighter departs, becomes airborne, is delayed, or lands — updating the shipment's status automatically and notifying the customer without a human watching a screen. This event-driven pattern is how scalable cargo-visibility products are built: subscribe to the relevant flights, let the alerts drive the workflow.
Building a reliable cargo product means understanding what flight-level data does and does not provide, so you do not promise visibility you cannot deliver.
Flight data does tell you: which carriers and aircraft operate freight, where a cargo flight is right now, its scheduled and actual times, whether it is delayed, the route it flies, and the aircraft type carrying it. That is the physical-movement layer, and for most shipper-facing visibility it is exactly what the customer wants to see.
Flight data does not tell you: the contents of a shipment, its weight or volume, the air waybill status, whether a consignment was actually loaded onto a particular flight, customs clearance state, or temperature and condition of the freight. That information lives in carrier and forwarder systems keyed to the AWB, and no flight tracking API can supply it — anyone claiming otherwise is overselling.
The right architecture, then, is a join: your system holds the shipment-to-flight mapping (which AWB is on which flight, from the booking), and AirLabs supplies the live flight-level truth for that flight. The waybill answers "which flight"; the API answers "where is that flight and when does it land". Designed this way, a logistics platform gives customers accurate, real-time movement visibility without claiming data it does not have.
Flight-level cargo data, enriched with airline, aircraft and route metadata, serves a range of logistics applications:
Forwarders track shipments by following the aircraft carrying them. Querying the Real-Time Flights API by aircraft registration or flight number provides the live position that shippers and consignees expect to see in a modern visibility dashboard, mapped to the shipment via the booking.
Cargo terminals plan staff and dock capacity around inbound freighter arrivals. The Schedules API, filtered by cargo carrier, provides the estimated arrival times and delays that drive resource allocation — knowing a freighter is 25 minutes late lets a terminal re-sequence its workload.
Logistics planners use the Routes Database to see which operators serve a freight lane and how often, supporting carrier selection and capacity decisions without relying on stale published timetables.
Charter brokers sourcing freighter capacity use the Fleets Database to identify which aircraft are freighters, their types and operators, and the Real-Time Flights API to see where those airframes currently are.
Supply-chain teams monitor high-value or time-critical freight for disruptions. Combining live status with the Flight Alert API surfaces delays and diversions as they happen, so exceptions are flagged and managed proactively rather than discovered after the fact.
A few patterns recur in production cargo-tracking systems built on flight data:
reg_number or hex tracks the physical aircraft continuously even when the flight number changes._fields to return only what your dashboard renders, keeping responses compact across many tracked shipments.If you are building a freight visibility platform, a logistics dashboard, a charter-sourcing tool or any system that needs to follow cargo flights, the AirLabs API provides the flight-level data — cargo airline identification, live freighter positions, schedules, routes and alerts — through documented REST endpoints.
Our Developer API allows you to create a custom experience for your users and increase the value of your product:
is_cargo flag to identify freight operators and combination carriers.You can try it right now without any obligation! Get a free flight API plan and see for yourself that we have exactly the data you need!
If you need more information, don't hesitate to contact us. We are always happy to chat with our customers and are sure to find a customized solution for each request.
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