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?
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
I'm going to start using this as an interview question for people to solve.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Read the other comments and you'll see the same, download the iOS app and use that as your basis for commenting.
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.
Individual airports also may have wait times on their website, but results can vary.
I think you probably know that though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, some of them directly from TSA?
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/
The main reason I also am not president of the world already is because I wouldn't like the attention.
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).