Flighty Now Tracks Airport Disruptions Worldwide

Article Comments
1

Originally published at: Flighty Now Tracks Airport Disruptions Worldwide - TidBITS

I’m flying from Syracuse to Minneapolis today for the ACES Conference, with a stop at LaGuardia, which has given me an excuse to start using Flighty again. I last wrote about the flight intelligence app on my previous trip to ACES in “Notes on Post-Pandemic Business Travel” (20 May 2024), and it has gotten even better since then.

Over the past two years, Flighty has started using air traffic control data and machine learning to predict late-aircraft delays up to 6 hours before the airlines acknowledge them, potentially letting you know that those incremental 30-minute delay announcements are actually going to be a multi-hour delay. It also ranks connections as relaxed, normal, tight, or risky, so you can prepare for a cross-airport dash. Last year, Flighty added Live Activity support to CarPlay, so those making airport pickups can have the latest information on-screen while driving.

Most recently, Flighty introduced Airport Intelligence, which uses AI to process a range of data—disruptions, extreme weather, traffic jams, low staffing, or closed airspace—and combines it with live flight tracking to provide an explanation of conditions at every airport in the world. Airport Intelligence powers notifications for individual flights—mine are all on time at the moment, and I hope they stay that way!—and you can track disruptions at your favorite airports if you or a family member is a frequent flyer.

For those who don’t use Flighty but still want to see what’s going on in a particular part of the world or at specific airports, the new Flighty Airports page provides a map showing disruption levels at major airports. As you pan and zoom the map, the dynamically adjusted list below shows departure and arrival delays for the airports in view.

Flighty Airports main page

Click any airport to see graphs showing recent departure and arrival delays, plus oodles of details. Frankly, I had to tear myself away from exploring all the data about LaGuardia to get this article posted and leave for my trip.

Flighty Airports detail page

If you or anyone you know is a little obsessed with air travel, the Flighty Airports page is addictive. And if you’re actually traveling, the Flighty app itself is well worth paying for during your trip for all the personalized data it provides—Flighty Pro costs $4.99 for a week or $59.99 for a year.

1 Like
2

Such a useful app. I drop in and out of my subscription, depending on my travel situation. So helpful to have in the airport.

2 Likes
3

Am I the only one who sees how asinine air travel routing is in these United States? Having to fly EAST to fly to a destination that is to your WEST is ridiculous. How long is it from Syracuse to Minneapolis flying via LaGuardia? Trivia: we have a bridge named after Fiorello here in Prescott, AZ.

1 Like
4

The Flighty Airport Status page is also available on the web:

5

Delta has at least one non-stop Syracuse to Minneapolis flight and multiple ones changing in Detroit.

1 Like
6

Just wanted to chime in to add that Flighty really is an excellent app from a great developer. Reminds me a lot of Carrot. One of those apps that’s all in on being excellent and charges accordingly. I don’t fly enough to use it often so it was really smart to offer a weekly subscription.

1 Like
7

Your “excuse to talk about Flighty again” came at a ripe time for me, as Alison and I are flying tomorrow. So I downloaded the app, and was pleasantly surprised by a one-flight free trial of the Pro subscription.

I’m not only a FlightAware user, but also run a FlightAware ADS-B feeder station using their Linux-based dongle and antenna kit. They’ve made some strides recently in producing detailed ground maps for airport operations, and are a great resource if you’re on the ground watching flights in the air.

But if you are going to be in the air watching what’s happening on the ground, Flighty has already offered much more information to me, and it’s all very clearly/cleanly presented.

Like others, I’m not flying enough to justify a continuous subscription, so the casual weekly option will work out best for me.

1 Like
8

Those flights are for people who value money more than time. It’s good to have non-direct lower cost alternatives.

1 Like
9

Well, time IS money! :rofl: Seriously for me, even though I’m retired, the less time I spend in airports and on planes the better. Many times I find that it would be more convenient to drive than to fly, simply due to the airlines poor scheduling.

10

It’s certainly non-intuitive, but it’s just the consequence of serving as many routes as possible. The direct flight that @silbey mentioned wasn’t available for my initial trip for whatever reason, so the bounce in LaGuardia was the only option.

Ironically, that set of flights worked fine, whereas I’m now sitting in the Minneapolis airport with an hour-long delay that’s going to drop me in Syracuse after midnight. Ugh.

1 Like
11

That’ll mean it will be about 2 more hours to Ithaca. Will/did you get some sleep on the flight?

12

45 minutes once he’s in the car.

13

Isn’t Ithaca about 65 miles from Syracuse? To make it in 45 minutes would mean an average speed of 87 mph.

14

Syracuse proper is about 55 miles. I was thinking of an old friend on the south side who was closer. SYR is north, so it’s about 65. That’s about 1 h 15, depending on traffic and weather.

15

Ah, that makes sense. Hopefully Adam got to sleep in this morning.

1 Like
16

Since there’s so much interest in my trip… :slight_smile: the flight left Minneapolis at the predicted delay time of 9:05 PM Central (70 minutes late) and arrived at Syracuse around 12:40 AM Eastern (thanks to the extra hour). I actually had a thoroughly enjoyable time in the back of the bus (last row in the plane) chatting with a graduating Ithaca College physical therapy student and track runner; we had a number of acquaintances in common, as often happens in Ithaca, and numerous shared topics of interest surrounding athletics and health. It took a long time to get on the ground because they changed our runway due to tailwinds, and then we had to wait on the tarmac for a jetway to be moved from another plane, during which my seatmate was starting to look for an Uber ride for him and his girlfriend (a Syracuse grad student in biomedical engineering). I inquired as to where they were going (since I knew they were going to be in Ithaca on the weekend for IC graduation), and when it became clear that they were basically on my way home, I offered them a ride so they didn’t have to wait for and pay for (apparently about $60 for a 6-mile trip) an Uber ride. That added about 15 minutes to my drive, but when you’re getting in that late, there isn’t much difference between 2:00 AM and 2:15 AM.

Although I was able to stay awake OK, I still appreciated the cruise control and lane-keeping capabilities of the IONIQ 5 as a backup while driving home on I-81.

5 Likes
17

You’re a mensch, @ace

18

It’s my second late-night ride bit of karma. Back in 1992, I think, on our first trip back to Ithaca after moving to Seattle, our connecting flight from LaGuardia to Ithaca (via Binghamton) was canceled, and they put us on a chartered city transit bus. It could barely go the speed limit and had to take the long route via PA because buses weren’t allowed on the shorter route at the time, as I remember. The driver thought he was just going up the Hudson a ways so he brought his girlfriend along. It took a LOT longer than anticipated, including a detour in a torrential thunderstorm to find diesel in rural PA. We finally dropped most of the passengers off in Binghamton around 2 AM, and made it to Ithaca about 3 AM—by this time we all knew each other pretty well (and were trying to convince the driver to get a hotel rather than driving back right away). My parents had left a car at the airport for us, so we volunteered to take the two other Ithaca passengers, an elderly professor who was the chair of Cornell’s Astronomy Department and a sophomore who was his self-described student slave home, rather than have them wake people up to get picked up. They were both roughly on the way as well in Cayuga Heights and North Campus, so it was an easy offer to make.

2 Likes
19

Yervant Terzian?

20

Yes! I wouldn’t have remembered the name on my own, but I do remember what he looked like. He was very grumpy at the airline at LaGuardia, but the interminable bus ride really tired him out.

1 Like