Air-freight shipment tracker with live flight alerts

Every three hours during our business hours, keep our inbound air-freight tracker up to date and let the warehouse know when a shipment's arrival changes.

Start by reading the tracker from our Google Sheet with the Get Values operation. Each row holds a shipment or purchase order reference, the flight number carrying it, the expected arrival date, and a status column. Focus only on rows for shipments that are still in transit, and skip any that are already marked landed, delivered, or cancelled.

For each in-transit shipment, look up the live status of its carrying flight with AviationStack's Get Flights (real-time) operation, matching on the flight's IATA or ICAO flight number. AviationStack sends its access key as the access_key query parameter, and its real-time flight lookup is available on every plan. The free plan is HTTP-only with a small monthly request quota, so keep the number of tracked shipments and the check frequency modest.

When a flight has landed, been delayed, or diverted, write the updated status and the actual or estimated arrival time back to that shipment's row with the Update Values operation. Target the specific row and columns for that shipment so nothing else in the sheet is disturbed.

Then, only when a flight has meaningfully changed (a fresh landing, a delay, or a diversion, not just a minor time shift), post a short note to our logistics Slack channel with the Send a Message operation so the warehouse knows when to expect the shipment. Keep each note brief and include the shipment or purchase order reference, the flight number, the new status, and the revised arrival time.

If a flight cannot be found, or a row has no valid flight number, skip that shipment and move on rather than writing an update or posting a note.