One small thought: as I scroll down on a particular airport page, it would be useful for that page to always display the airport's name in a fixed position. I've opened up a few airports and scrolled down to look at the data, and then was unable to tell which page was which airport without scrolling the pages back to the top (I later realized I could just look at the URL, which is cool).
How does an app like this make money? I made an app that I simply can’t promote because it would bankrupt me. Every person I share it with thinks it’s genius and been using it but if it ever hits critical mass without me knowing it, id be those guys with the “my cloud provider reamed me overnight” posts.
Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby. If you stay away from expensive cloud providers and use cheap vServers, you can host a site like that for around 5-20$/month (depending on number of users).
Ads? It's not great for users but it's decent monetization. If you really have something good, like actually liked, you can do a donation vs ad-supported model.
It’s one of those slick apps designed to superficially look nice without actually being well-thought-out. That’s not what design is or should mean; that’s just aesthetics.
Case in point: one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration, is displayed in the tiniest type size on the flight info display pane, in light grey text on a slightly darker grey background. It’s bordering on illegible.
It also doesn’t surface boarding time (or countdown to same), which is the single most important piece of data a flight tracker can give you.
> one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration
Flighty is all about getting you to the airport in time for your flight, so the most important pieces of information are things like departure times, connection times, delay information, terminal and boarding gate. These are prioritised in the interface.
The flight duration is set when you book the flight and it's not going to change, there is no reason to prioritise this.
> It also doesn’t surface boarding time
I think this would be useful but difficult data to get. Airlines sometimes will push boarding announcements to their own apps but I doubt they would agree to feed Flighty.
I think the design is great; my only gripe is it's awful on the iPad mini. But so are Apple apps. They think it makes sense for the side drawer (in portrait mode) to cover half the screen. Which is especially insane in apps with maps where the drawer COVERS THE "YOU ARE HERE" DOT.
Why is duration important? Surely you already knew what it was when you booked and it's not like it changes. I can't say that I've ever wanted to double check the duration of my flight.
While I appreciate the aesthetics of this feature I actually fear it represents a loss of focus for Flighty. As a traveller, I don't need a global view of airport disruptions, I need relevant info for my flights.
Given the prominent TV Mode button in the interface, this update seems to be about competing with Flightradar24, who sell business subscriptions for airports and related sectors for information displays.
I agree. The reason I love Flighty vs FlightAware or Flightradar24 is because the app is solely focused on my flights. The real-time tactical information about delays and inbound aircraft is so good that it is very heavily used by airline employees since even the airlines are not great about providing this data in a timely fashion to their front line employees.
The dashboard is really nice and if it remained free I could see integrating it into a display's playlist in my office but, I highly doubt this doesn't turn into a hefty subscription service.
it sounds like the app already does what you need it to do. developers can spend a few hours on something other than #1 most pressing core feature every now and then.
They can do both things at once. Airports desperately need to be displaying accurate information and stop letting gate agents make random calls based on their interpreting of company policy
> Airports desperately need to be displaying accurate information [..]
Airports and airlines may have information that they deliberately do not share with passengers.
For example: a large European airport that I once did some work for ran a trial in which they announced departure boarding gates significantly earlier. The effect was that passengers went to their gates earlier.
The side effect was that retail revenues in the terminal fell during the trial. Yes, this was a metric.
Guess what? They decided not to proceed with announcing departure gates earlier and went back to the previous system.
How do you expect that to work? Automatic reporting is impossible, you have to rely on individuals to arrive there, open the app and take a guess. Then by the time you see the report the line is long gone (or tripled)
Ideally the TSA at each airport would measure it and release it. They should be measuring it anyway since they should both have efficiency targets for how much of a delay they introduce, and also so that they can show data about how much or little inconvenience they cause when DOGE finally comes to cut one of the actually utterly useless government expenditures.
Since the TSA doesn't seem to be releasing this data though, apple or google could spy on GPS and motion data for individuals to estimate when people entire the line and pass through security, and derive a better-than-nothing estimate. It does seem like the government refusing to do something, and apple/google stepping in and doing a government-like thing is a norm, so even though I'm joking I wouldn't even be that surprised.
> Due to the federal funding lapse, this airport has temporarily suspended wait time reporting. Allow significantly more time at security and check with your airline for flight status.
On one level I'd love for them to add in my hotel reservations so I have my whole trip in one place. But hotels don't need real time tracking like flights do.
I think this may be a 'bug': as you zoom into the US west coast, SAN is visible before LAX. But LAX serves much more people every day, so a random person is much more likely to care about LAX. Intuitively, it seems to me that LAX should show up first. That could be intentional, but I can't think of a good reason why that choice would be made.
"Most disrupted" routes/airlines should be adjusted. Right now now it shows total numbers so the main airline or destination of any airport is always "most disrupted" which is a bit useless
Flighty is very pretty, but I’m not giving up FlightAware anytime soon.
I travel a lot, and frequently encounter flight delays. It’s mind boggling difficult to find out where my plane is when it’s delayed via Flighty. This and a few other things, FlightAware gets right.
I feel like Flighty is for rare leisure traveler and FlightAware is for weekly business and/or pilot traveler.
I’ve honestly had better luck with iOS built in flight tracker than Flighty itself.
Flighty is in a weird place because I'm a rare/leisure traveller and wow Flighty nowhere near reasonably priced for that market.
I used it in free mode when I was on iOS, but it would be ~£10 per trip for something that would improve my life less than a coffee at the airport.
In my opinion they need to aggressively cut costly features (like weather data), and if they have different international data feeds, perhaps do region locked pricing. I don't fly to the US much, so let me buy a Europe and Asia subscription and skip the US costs. Or vice-versa. It would have needed to be ~£10 a year at most.
I fly around 6x/yr but I still found it useful enough to get the lifetime plan. I suppose if I only flew once per year I wouldn't have gotten it, but I don't mind paying ~$10/flight (probably even lower by now, and who knows what it will drop to by the time Flighty stops working, hopefully more like ~$1/flight). A typical trip might cost in the range of ~thousands of dollars so $10 to reduce my stress levels when there is a delay is worth it in my book.
For example... if there's a delay and so because you found out sooner you can stay home an extra hour instead of sitting at the airport I would pay $10 for that.
The promise is that it informs you quickly about flight delays, flight cancellations and gate changes. In my limited experience, it didn’t work satisfactorily for a flight delay of a few hours. It could not provide any reliable updates.
It’s a nice app and service, but I wouldn’t trust all those reviews that are like “I knew before the aircraft pilot knew”. It has its own limitations.
I don’t see any value in knowing before the pilot knows. I’ve mostly flown American the past few years and with their app I get updates about delays and gate changes on my phone just fine. I suppose there might be some advantage to getting the notification a bit earlier, but I doubt that they can reliably give information faster than the airline itself.
Yeah, the most notable "use", not necessarily "value", is when the airline is still prevaricating over the delay, you're approaching boarding time and you can see from ADS-B that the inbound aircraft hasn't even begun initial descent.
Last year Flighty literally saved me from an overnight delay because it notified me the incoming aircraft was still on the ground at the previous airport. I was able to snag the last couple seats on a later scheduled flight which actually departed. My original flight ended up getting canceled.
As airline crew, I stay in the lounge (employee lounge, not bar lounge) when I know I'm not going anywhere on time.
Flighty gets heavy use from US airline employees. We're frequently in the airport with a brief break before flying the next flight. Usually, this next flight will be on an aircraft that hasn't arrive to the airport yet. Most of us will find a quiet place to relax for awhile and it's really irritating to pack stuff back up and walk to the gate just to find out there's no plane.
Another scenario is you arrive to an airport and need to switch aircraft. The "turn" time might be scheduled for 45 min. It's really nice to know as you walk off the aircraft that "Hey, it's actually delayed. Now I have 2 hours." I'll go grab a bite to eat or catch up with family back home etc.
My particular airline will show you what the next inbound aircraft is and it's flight number and ETA but it's a "fetch" experience. You open the app, wait for a refresh, click like 4 times to navigate to the right page, get the tactical information. Flighty keeps it on the lock screen. Just lift your phone and it's there.
We're constantly asking our employer to emulate Flighty. Tech isn't their strong suit though.
I don’t get why they get so much praise for design with such a big design flaw:
If a flight is delayed even 1 minute, it’s highlighted as red text. This throws me off every time.
Google does not this. It still shows as green if it’s just a few minutes delayed.
I’ve reported this to the Flighty team and they ignored me so I can only assume they think this is a good idea, and I will therefore never pay for their app.
Why can't you just like an app, why do you have to turn it into a personal statement about your dislike of AI? If AI was not involved, why bring it up?
I imagine you live your life contextually, whereby your daily experiences are felt against the backdrop of the immediate events you, then your community, and eventually the world at large. If the rest of the world was involved, why not bring it up?
Fascinating, I was struck by the exact opposite. The text overflowed the search bar, the bottom table was difficult to read, the airports all just kind of pulsed brown every couple seconds, I assumed this was a slopped together weekend project someone was advertising here.
But the iOS app is not what was shared. Why would someone use an iOS app they haven't used as the basis for their comment? Especially since you yourself did not mention it in your top comment?
I wish the data would be more reliable (or they have better sanity checks) though. One of my flights suddenly "departed" one hour+ before scheduled time. I almost got heart attack.
Needless to say there were no objective reasons for that - airport dashboard was showing proper time and flight departed with 30min delay (displayed by Flighty as 1.5hr delay).
I've never seen what you describe but I have seen other data issues. It usually depends on the airline, the same types of problems occur with the same airlines.
I've asked and they say there's little they can do, the airlines systems are broadcasting this data and some airlines are better at it than others.
To be fair, it was the first majour hiccup with the app. Usually it is quite correct.
It's hard to believe airline broadcasted incorrect data in my case. Even if that was the case, they could have cross checked it with airport data, which is way easier to obtain compared to airline stream.
And also they could have additional checks for cases when aicraft "changes" departure time to 1 hr before scheduled at around 2 hours before scheduled time. It should be highly unusual case.
It also has links to a lot of other information useful for people in the airline industry.
I find the Airport Arrival Demand Chart to be good for seeing a big picture of all the flights: https://www.fly.faa.gov/aadc/
One small thought: as I scroll down on a particular airport page, it would be useful for that page to always display the airport's name in a fixed position. I've opened up a few airports and scrolled down to look at the data, and then was unable to tell which page was which airport without scrolling the pages back to the top (I later realized I could just look at the URL, which is cool).
The main reason I also am not president of the world already is because I wouldn't like the attention.
It’s one of those slick apps designed to superficially look nice without actually being well-thought-out. That’s not what design is or should mean; that’s just aesthetics.
Case in point: one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration, is displayed in the tiniest type size on the flight info display pane, in light grey text on a slightly darker grey background. It’s bordering on illegible.
It also doesn’t surface boarding time (or countdown to same), which is the single most important piece of data a flight tracker can give you.
Flighty is all about getting you to the airport in time for your flight, so the most important pieces of information are things like departure times, connection times, delay information, terminal and boarding gate. These are prioritised in the interface.
The flight duration is set when you book the flight and it's not going to change, there is no reason to prioritise this.
> It also doesn’t surface boarding time
I think this would be useful but difficult data to get. Airlines sometimes will push boarding announcements to their own apps but I doubt they would agree to feed Flighty.
If you're in the US!
What is your use case for Flighty, and why would this information be important at all?
Given the prominent TV Mode button in the interface, this update seems to be about competing with Flightradar24, who sell business subscriptions for airports and related sectors for information displays.
The dashboard is really nice and if it remained free I could see integrating it into a display's playlist in my office but, I highly doubt this doesn't turn into a hefty subscription service.
Airports and airlines may have information that they deliberately do not share with passengers.
For example: a large European airport that I once did some work for ran a trial in which they announced departure boarding gates significantly earlier. The effect was that passengers went to their gates earlier.
The side effect was that retail revenues in the terminal fell during the trial. Yes, this was a metric.
Guess what? They decided not to proceed with announcing departure gates earlier and went back to the previous system.
Anybody have a good solution that's utilizing actual traveler data vs the (non existent atm) TSA data?
This request has no basis in reality.
Since the TSA doesn't seem to be releasing this data though, apple or google could spy on GPS and motion data for individuals to estimate when people entire the line and pass through security, and derive a better-than-nothing estimate. It does seem like the government refusing to do something, and apple/google stepping in and doing a government-like thing is a norm, so even though I'm joking I wouldn't even be that surprised.
Well, some of them directly from TSA?
Individual airports also may have wait times on their website, but results can vary.
I'm going to start using this as an interview question for people to solve.
Edit: actually it's even weirder. Here's the zoom levels I see, from zoomed out, to zoomed in:
- BNE, MEL
- BNE, SYD, MEL
- BNE, CBR, MEL (??)
- BNE, SYD, CBR, MEL
Everything from on design, to features, to data integrations. It's everything that vibe coding and agents don't get you. I appreciate their craft.
I travel a lot, and frequently encounter flight delays. It’s mind boggling difficult to find out where my plane is when it’s delayed via Flighty. This and a few other things, FlightAware gets right.
I feel like Flighty is for rare leisure traveler and FlightAware is for weekly business and/or pilot traveler.
I’ve honestly had better luck with iOS built in flight tracker than Flighty itself.
I used it in free mode when I was on iOS, but it would be ~£10 per trip for something that would improve my life less than a coffee at the airport.
In my opinion they need to aggressively cut costly features (like weather data), and if they have different international data feeds, perhaps do region locked pricing. I don't fly to the US much, so let me buy a Europe and Asia subscription and skip the US costs. Or vice-versa. It would have needed to be ~£10 a year at most.
For example... if there's a delay and so because you found out sooner you can stay home an extra hour instead of sitting at the airport I would pay $10 for that.
It’s a nice app and service, but I wouldn’t trust all those reviews that are like “I knew before the aircraft pilot knew”. It has its own limitations.
I'm almost certainly going to be waiting at the airport anyway by the time the delay is confirmed.
Flighty gets heavy use from US airline employees. We're frequently in the airport with a brief break before flying the next flight. Usually, this next flight will be on an aircraft that hasn't arrive to the airport yet. Most of us will find a quiet place to relax for awhile and it's really irritating to pack stuff back up and walk to the gate just to find out there's no plane.
Another scenario is you arrive to an airport and need to switch aircraft. The "turn" time might be scheduled for 45 min. It's really nice to know as you walk off the aircraft that "Hey, it's actually delayed. Now I have 2 hours." I'll go grab a bite to eat or catch up with family back home etc.
My particular airline will show you what the next inbound aircraft is and it's flight number and ETA but it's a "fetch" experience. You open the app, wait for a refresh, click like 4 times to navigate to the right page, get the tactical information. Flighty keeps it on the lock screen. Just lift your phone and it's there.
We're constantly asking our employer to emulate Flighty. Tech isn't their strong suit though.
If a flight is delayed even 1 minute, it’s highlighted as red text. This throws me off every time.
Google does not this. It still shows as green if it’s just a few minutes delayed.
I’ve reported this to the Flighty team and they ignored me so I can only assume they think this is a good idea, and I will therefore never pay for their app.
They’ve hurt their brand here really, which is a high quality native app experience that makes sense of a lot of granular data from different sources.
Read the other comments and you'll see the same, download the iOS app and use that as your basis for commenting.
Needless to say there were no objective reasons for that - airport dashboard was showing proper time and flight departed with 30min delay (displayed by Flighty as 1.5hr delay).
I've asked and they say there's little they can do, the airlines systems are broadcasting this data and some airlines are better at it than others.
It's hard to believe airline broadcasted incorrect data in my case. Even if that was the case, they could have cross checked it with airport data, which is way easier to obtain compared to airline stream.
And also they could have additional checks for cases when aicraft "changes" departure time to 1 hr before scheduled at around 2 hours before scheduled time. It should be highly unusual case.
I think you probably know that though.