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I'm not sure the use case for this. It seems the information provided is just number of on-time/delayed/cancelled flights, but how is the user meant to use that information? Check before booking flight and choose another airport it it has more on-time flights? I think most people are just going to fly out of the nearest/most convenient airport and hope for the best.
I was hoping this might have information about length of security lines, a bit like Google maps indicating delays due to traffic build up, but this doesn't seem to be there. That would have been useful/actionable - give an idea how far ahead to arrive at airport to make it through security.
Flighty is generally built around supporting your flight experience. I’m a touring lighting designer, and I spend a fairly large portion of my life in the air. Myself and most other touring crew I know adore Flighty. We get precious few hours to sleep, and being able to sleep in a few extra hours due to delays or spend an extra 30 minutes in the lounge eating and showing makes the difference between a good show and a bad show.
Flighty has 99% of the time notified me about issues before airlines have. In a couple situations it’s been more than 6 hours ahead of airline communication and I can personally speak to the amount of shows myself and my artists have been able to make because of an early notification about a delay or cancellation giving us enough time to reroute before everyone else rebooks.
Also the flighty passport has some amazing data and stats we all love to share with each other every year.
The new update just looks to add another tool to the flighty tool belt to keep me appraised of how likely I am to make it to my next show. Jury is still out on how good the data is though!
I travel 4-5 trips a year and I didn't hesitate for a second to pay for Flighty, because this was one of those "man these guys deserve to be rewarded for the amazing job they've done"
I have had at least 2-3 situations where Flighty gave me information before the airport did, and that I ended up being a guy informing a few fellow passengers on the status of our flight before the airlines did.
They've chosen a niche, have executed extremely well, and I'm happy to throw $50/year at them to say thank you for an excellent product that does everything I want.
My ONLY complaint is that during a flight, flighty's live activity or something uses up a TON of battery. It seems unlike them to overlook such a thing when the rest of the app has such a polish and attention to detail (form and function-wise)
You created this account 14 minutes prior to this post. Forgive me if I don't trust your testimonials. Feels very astroturf
Haha i knew i was going to get this reply. Long time lurker first time poster. My instagram backs up the story @bodhihawken
Honestly have just been using Flighty for 4 years
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Flighty was recommended to me by a flight attendant and I also have been notified hours ahead of the airlines by it.
You logged in after a 5 year hiatus to advertise for an app?
As not a shill myself, who comments on a variety of stuff regularly, I could totally see why the mention of a product someone loves is the thing that pulls them out of lurking.
Keep it up, I think you’re onto something. Sus
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I’m regular commenter with an old (er) account. Flighty is an 11/10 experience.
Take it from an older account then. Flighty has been amazing, I can attest to every point above (except sleeping in airports, I don't do that)
> I think most people are just going to fly out of the nearest/most convenient airport and hope for the best.
There are many cities in the world with more than a single airport at relatively close distance. Just to name the few I've been to recently: New York City, London, Paris, Dubai.
I think it's useful information if it turns out one of these choices has significantly higher cancellation rates.
> a bit like Google maps indicating delays due to traffic build up,
Traffic on google maps might actually be a good canary for airport issues.
If you fly a lot, you might also be aware of the National Airspace System Status: https://nasstatus.faa.gov/
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 equivalent for Europe is probably https://www.public.nm.eurocontrol.int/PUBPORTAL/gateway/spec... (at least what I use when there is major disruption).
And here's Canada's: https://spaces.navcanada.ca/workspace/ois/
I've never seen the nasstatus page, but I have seen the OIS page, which I use frequently when experiencing delays to find out what's going on: https://www.fly.faa.gov/ois/?legacy=true
The links on the NAS page are also really good. nice share!
MiseryMap: https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/
Misery Map adds two crucial pieces of context: the delays between airports, and rain/snow on the map, which often is the reason for delays. It's nice to see it all together.
Any way to see other airports? I never travel to the US
Pretty interesting link as well. Thanks for sharing
Where's Alaska and Hawaii ?
Such delightful UI.
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).
did u see the TV mode link? i wish more visualization sites had that.
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.
I use the Flighty app pretty often, and its $60/year.
The app is mac/i os-only, though.
How's this related to anything?
It means it's strictly unavailable for ~80% of people out there on Windows/Linux/Android?
I've seen many developers who released the same app on both iOS and Android and realized that Apple platforms still provide them with 80% of revenue for 20% of users.
Not that many people on Android are willing to pay $60 for an app.
Developing for Android is also a much worse developer experience than developing for iOS, because there are thousands of devices to support, and much greater stratification of operating system customizations and older versions.
https://dontkillmyapp.com/ is just one example of the kind of problems app developers face on Android
IOS it's work at killing apps that android. Some software manufacturers in android allow you to bypass it in the settings.
Yeah, iOS would never kill an app in the background to try and save battery
That’s true globally, but in the US, iPhones are 60% of the smartphone market. In the US, iPhone users are also younger, more affluent, more educated, and I suspect more likely to fly than Android users. iOS users also dominate in app spending. And from a practical standpoint, 93% of iPhone users are on the latest version of iOS within six months, compared to 20% of Android users, which is huge when it comes to development costs.
>It means it's strictly unavailable for ~80% of people out there on Windows/Linux/Android?
Those platforms don't generate revenue
Ok, post that as a top comment, it's completely irrelevant to the comment that it replied to.
Like GP, I'm also a paid subscriber and I couldn't care less where else it's available. If anything, it being a native app rather than a multiplatform JS wrapper is a plus to me.
It's a business - they're targeting revenues. Making it multi-platform would take alot of effort and the value just isn't there for them right now. The smart move is for them to become awesome on iOS (maybe they're close?) and then create an Android CX.
BTW, them being iOS-only means they're probably getting lots of marketing support from Apple and other perks. That can really help a startup.
Yes, but the question is how it makes money, not whether it could make more money by expanding into other OS’s.
Right, but the question was “how does this app make money?” And the app being ios/mac only isnt at all relevant to that question.
This app brings me so much delight. Seeing the incoming plane, knowing % chance of onetime or late.
Honestly I often know changes from Flighty for my flights before the airlines do or at least before they notify me. I had once my carrier said on time and Flighty said 90 mins delay. I went to the airport on time and turns out flight was delayed. Should have just trusted them!
I'm sure the app is wonderful. I've gotten pretty good at finding this data from other sources, though, and one huge problem is that a delay isn't a delay until the airline says it is. If you carry on every bag and have no special requirements, and you checked in online ahead of time (so you have your boarding pass), it's very useful info and I could see paying for the app.
But if, say, you are traveling with a pet that has to be verified at the counter, or you need to check a bag, the time windows for accepting those are set by the scheduled departure time. If your plane is still in the air or hasn't even left its origination airport (and, for the sake of argument here, we will assume you are flying from a smaller airport that doesn't have other aircraft that can easily be reassigned to your flight, so you know it will be delayed), it doesn't matter: they still close the check-in and baggage 45 minutes (on American; YMMV by airline) before scheduled departure. So you have no choice but to get there early and wait unless your airline actually declares the flight delayed when they know it will happen.
Subscriptions on the iOS app. Per SensorTower, it's making ~$1m/month.
That to me is amazing. I would not pay that much for this and I guess I project that on the user base
Makes me wonder then why they can't afford a team of Android developers to make the Android version.
Because they don’t want to?
It’s not just about money. It’s complexity, company size, management, etc.. Loss of focus by having to build a new app from ground up. Features and improvements take longer as they have to be done twice. Parity problems. Support debt. Maintaining multiple versions of the same app isn’t just “hire more”.
As you agreed with, they are successful. Maybe they’re happy with that.
It’s not that they can’t afford it, it’s that Android users aren’t worth the investment.
I'm sure they can afford that, but would that end up paying for itself? Would that end up bringing in enough new paying users to justify spending all that money on a team of Android engineers?
They probably haven't done it because it doesn't make sense for them financially.
Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby. If you stay away from expensive cloud providers and use cheap vServers, you can host a site like that for around 5-20$/month (depending on number of users).
>Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby.
The gp asked a reasonable question. Your admonition about making money is misplaced because your assumption about it being a hobby is incorrect.
The website was developed by Flighty LLC. To answer the gp's question: Although the website itself doesn't have direct monetization, it acts as "inbound marketing" for the paid iOS app. Clicking on "Download Flighty" takes the user to the Apple App Store:
In-App Purchases
Week-to-Week Flighty Pro $4.99
Annual Savings Flighty Pro $59.99
Month-to-Month Flighty Pro $9.99
Annual Savings (Family Plan) $119.00
Lifetime Flighty Pro $299.00
Flexible Monthly (Family Plan) $15.99
Week-to-Week Flighty Pro $4.99
Week-to-Week Flighty Pro $7.99
Pro Family Lifetime $449.00
Annual Savings Flighty Pro $59.99
It's not just a $5/month VPS. Some cursory googling says Flighty gets data from the FlightAware Firehose api which costs a lot of money. The cost would exceed the financial resources of most people to make an equivalent free hobby website. (https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/firehose/documentatio...)
They said "an app like this" and went on to talk about their app (which is undisclosed) which can't be monetized.
Funnily enough, I just went to download the app, checked the in-app purchases and saw the list you've posted here, then promptly closed the App Store.
How much does this app cost? Who knows?! Does a "Week-to-Week Flighty Pro" subscription cost $4.99 or $7.99? Why is Week-to-Week Flighty Pro $4.99 in the list twice? Same for Annual Savings Flighty Pro $59.99. Apple have made such a fucking mess of in-app purchases that we end up with this kind of rubbish, and I can't place any trust in a developer who allows their in-app purchases list to look like this. So they just lost a sale.
Some people wonder why kids climb trees.
You don’t know anything about my app though. I just couldn’t believe that many people would pay this subscription to keep it going. I’m not trying to make money, I just don’t need it to drain my account
Why do you need a cloud provider? Can't a 5$ VPS do the job?
That's just a cloud with a different company's name attached.
Yeah, but a $5 VPS won't suddenly surprise you with a five-figure bill.
All my projects are also pure genius and the only reason they are not hyper successful is they'd be too expensive to run too.
The main reason I also am not president of the world already is because I wouldn't like the attention.
The popularity and traffic it brings is a gain and a value itself. The web specialists will be able to simply convert it into economic value.
Have you asked people how much they'd be willing to pay?
If you search for them on LinkedIn, it's a small team of ~5 outside of Silicon Valley (Austin, Spain, Norway). I'm sure they're doing quite well but even if they were doing just ok it doesn't have to make billions for everyone to do ok.
What’s your app? Where do the costs come from?
pro features and IAP
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.
I’ve ran the numbers and the APIs I have to pay for would be more expensive. I’ve tried caching the data which works to some degree but still a negative unless I really degrade the experience
Love Flightly, one of the best apps ever. Beautiful design + incredibly useful info.
Flighty is poorly designed.
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.
In my extensive travel experience, more than half the time the boarding time listed at the gate isn't even correct.
Boarding times are basically not reliable at all. Any time I come 10m after the official boarding time on the ticket there's still a standing line.
My guess is that's because boarding a plane is a little bit like being an extra for a film, it's a hurry up and wait situation. If they printed the exact time boarding starts and people showed up then (and later), no flight would ever board on time. Better for the airline to print an earlier time and have people wait longer, so they can board as quickly as possible. Every minute behind schedule costs the airline money.
AA displays the boarding time in the app instead of the departure time once the flight gets close enough (like same day)
>If they printed the exact time boarding starts and people showed up then (and later), no flight would ever board on time
I don't understand the logic. If everyone is there at the stated boarding time and the airline has correctly allocated enough time for boarding, aren't they winning?
200 people can't board at the same second. Reality is you want orderly boarding over the course of ~ 10-15mins depending on passenger makeup. Crew also need to account for passenger with additional needs, catering recharge, etc
The point is "everyone is there at the stated boarding time" never actually happens IRL, so you give an earlier time.
Yes, and the actual time is probably too close to the official take off time.
But this is why Flighty probably doesn't show it, it's irrelevant.
Just don't try this on Ryan Air. A good friend got stuck at the airport on a Sunday night after being denied boarding because he waited out the standing line sitting on a bench right by the gate. As soon as the last person standing walked through the checkpoint the gate crew closed the gate -- and completely ignored my friend when he showed up 10 seconds later.
How did his actual boarding time match up with the contractually agreed boarding close time?
Most budget airlines pull this crap but I've started pushing back especially when it's poor weather outside and they expect us to wait in the rain just to improve their metrics
They need some EU261 denied boarding threats/claims to sort them out
Boarding is hard because it's at the discretion of the airlines, yeah. Departure time is easier because of https://www.fly.faa.gov/edct/showEDCT
> Departure time is easier because of https://www.fly.faa.gov/edct/showEDCT
If you're in the US!
True. I think you'd have to scrape it from sites that expose it or pay for an API for a country like the UK.
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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.
Knowing when I land, especially if there are any disturbances, is probably THE most important piece of information with regards to a flight. I have already planned my airport arrival, at least for the first leg, and the worst scenario is I have to stare at a screen/book for a bit longer. If the landing is delayed I might need to make amendments to the plans for the rest of the day.
The complaint is about the visibility of the flight duration (e.g. "this flight will take 1h 50m"), not the landing time (e.g. "this flight will land at 11:25am"). The landing time is prominently displayed in the flight info pane. Knowing your flight duration (gate-to-gate time) is not impacted whatsoever by flight delays, so I think you're conflating these two things inappropriately.
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.
>one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration,
What is your use case for Flighty, and why would this information be important at all?
I regularly fly all over the world, and it's nice to know how long my flights are going to be? I'm not always flying direct, and seeing the lengths of the legs and the lengths of the layovers allows me to plan my day and my sleep schedule.
You do have landing time for all of the legs? That’s more useful than duration. For your sleep, you care about landing says, at midnight, as oppose to a 10 hr flight from Paris that may or may not arrive during day time at the destination.
I use their widgets more than the app itself. They display the most important information I need well imo.
What would be super useful is an indicator of how long it takes to get through TSA
Flighty is a great app. I travel a lot and use it all the time to manage my flights. Highly recommend.
CDG shows yellow (“minor issues”), 65% of planes arrive on time, 0% cancelled. FRA shows green (“normal operations”) 59% of planes arrive on time, 4% cancelled.
Surely that’s wrong?
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.
Google Maps has had this bug with street names not revealing based on any rational priority at varying zoom levels.. for like a decade.
I'm going to start using this as an interview question for people to solve.
If you think this is an easy problem to solve, here's an old article that discusses some of the challenges in doing so:
I don't think it's an easy problem to solve at all, that's why I quipped about making it an interview problem. :) In an interview, I'm just interested in hearing people talk through trying to solve difficult problems. Getting to a solution is incidental. And it's way more fun when I don't know of a go-to solution, either.
Similar in Australia, BNE shows up before SYD.
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
Haha I came in to write the exact same thing. Such a weird choice
This screams vibe-coded slop. Think about it, if you were to implement zoom based detail level, you would have to try hard to introduce a bug on line 3, yet it happens to hit prod.
Yet, this thread is full of people defending this pre-alpha quality thing.
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I think the map is biased towards airports with the most disruptions, not the largest.
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Not only that, but airports blink in-and-out of existence as you zoom or pan the map around. It can't even decide if it wants to show a certain airport or not.
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Absolute metrics like "Most Disrupted Airlines" are completely useless if they are not normalized by the number of flights per each airline.
Flighty is terrific, well worth the subscription cost. I'm delighted to see a replacement for the last part of FlightAware I still used.
Clicked this and was hopeful it was a TSA-line-tracker
Anybody have a good solution that's utilizing actual traveler data vs the (non existent atm) TSA data?
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)
This request has no basis in reality.
Not sure how they're getting their data, but https://tsa.fromthetraytable.com/
> 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.
Well, some of them directly from TSA?
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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.
Note: the web interface exposes minimal info, the rest is hidden in a mac-only app. Don't bother.
It has always been an iPhone app for many years, only now they have exposed some information on the site (Probably for getting incoming links), so this is more interesting if you are already an existing user of the app.
You only really need to know when (departure/arrival time) and where (terminal/gate), no?
What else necessary info that’s missing?
I mean, still better than having to go to airports' official pages
A select airport view has flight data limited to some x hours, meaning you cannot even see if a flight later in the day is still scheduled to arrive on time without consulting those official pages anyway. So quite objectively no, it's not even objectively worse, it's effectively useless.
Going back to a map view from an airport view resets the map, so exploration for fun is again borderline unusable.
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Was going to say this. I'm getting real tired of sites trying to force me to download their spyware apps
Curious what the criteria are for which airports to show at a given zoom level.
At the default for me it showed SFO and SAN, both green, and did not show LAX. LAX is a bigger and busier airport than SFO and SAN.
I'm not saying they were wrong not to show it. Just curious - It was apparently a common interview question - what place names should you show a map at a certain zoom level.
Flighty is nearly useless when using low-cost carriers, such as RyanAir, WizzAir, etc, which seem to be predominantly covering destinations I use.
Flighty is easily my favorite iOS app. I fly 10-20 times a year, mostly recreationally, and have come to rely on Flighty for travel updates, tracking my partners flights, and general stats through their Passport feature. Beautifully designed, and it just seems like they’ve really thought through every feature. It’s the gold standard for apps.
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 disagree. I live in Lisbon and the local airport is in a pretty bad condition these days. It's helpful to be able to get a general view.
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.
the app has so many bugs and missing features, I'm not a heavy user just like 60 flights a year but I love and hate flighty
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.
Having the departure / arrival boards of the airports in the app in a easy to find and uniform way is a great feature and is exactly what I pay Flighty for. Having to find this information on airport websites is horrible and the alternative websites for that are usually filled with ads or behind a lock screen.
I'd say that's exactly the focus for Flighty to have that.
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.
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What’s up with all the complaining that this wonderful app isn’t available on non Apple platforms? Android isn’t worth it for monetization and one of the reasons Flighty is so good is that the developer picked a platform and created a native app. Idgi.
I was thinking this was something to help estimate the time to get through airport security. It's still very cool, though. I love the TV mode!
MyTSA has that (or… I presume will have that again once TSA is back online).
Individual airports also may have wait times on their website, but results can vary.
Yeah, I think that flighty already aggregates various data sources to predict flight delays, I thought maybe they were expanding to include security wait times.
I wish they would add hotel reservations. Loss of focus but I want it as much as flight tracking.
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Happy to see Kyiv doing so well! Not a single delayed flight.
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No description or about page or anything? Seems pretty bare bones.
Does it show ICEy conditions too?
Maybe this week is an edge but a lot of airports, including mine, are showing no issues, but have major issues outside of flights being on time
I rarely bookmark things but just did. For some reason, I never get this data concisely from Google search and always look for it. Nice job.
I have about 3000+ bookmarks in my KaraKeep instance
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Notice a lot of Canadian airports are yellow right now. Is this normal?
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Also recommend nasstatus.FAA.gov
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.
A website requiring me to download their app for detailed report on certain airport is not worth my time.
Flighty is an app. Not a website. The website just tells you about the app.
I think you probably know that though.
Isn't this currently showing a flaw in their system? It correctly shows LaGuardia as having issues but also shows nearby airports as having issues due to severe arrival delays. But surely those delays are also due to LaGuardia? Maybe that's still useful, though? I don't know. Rarely fly.
A lot of that was due to LGA, yes. However, that doesn't stop those airports from being affected. Getting tons of traffic rerouted is inevitably going to cause delays across the whole airspace. Very useful to know.
Very pleasant UI. Good job!
"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 a good representation of what craft - compounded over time - gives you.
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.
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.
What does it actually do? People seem to get very excited about it but my flight status is always either “on the plane” or “not on the plane”
I’m a touring lighting designer, I fly anywhere from 20-120 times a year. Every fellow LD I know uses Flighty, any time i get delayed flighty tells me before the airline does.
I especially love that it usually tells me or warns me about a delay before I leave the lounge, so i get to spend some more time relaxing. That and of course the amazing data in your flighty passport!
This looks like you signed up for hacker news to post ads on this ad.
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.
I think I figured it out - if you can figure out a cancellation before everyone else you can get to the counter and get on another flight before everyone.
I've had once cancellation in my life so I see why the need hasn't presented itself very loudly.
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.
I still don't really see the use, but maybe there are large swaths of people who stay home until they can leave at the very last minute.
I'm almost certainly going to be waiting at the airport anyway by the time the delay is confirmed.
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.
Thank you! That's the use case and I see the value; I learned to compensate by never taking the "last flight out" if I could avoid it.
What do you do with that information though?
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.
Sounds like you identified a business opportunity for Flighty - license the functionality or just sell app access to the entire airline, at least for employees.
Nah they’ll ruin it. I’d rather Flighty charge a couple hundred bucks and maintain a comfortable business than let my employer wreck a good thing.
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.
Flighty routinely tells me about cancelled flights before any other app or the airline itself.
FlightAware and Flighty are usually within seconds of each other and always ahead of the airlines.
(except United)
I agree, I find that the "MiseryMap" from flightaware is less "pretty" but much more informationally dense. https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/
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.
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.
This web app has very little design-wise in common with the iOS app. It doesn’t even serve the same use case.
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.
I am commenting on the entire app experience on iOS not a single web app they released today (which unfortunately is what can be linked on HN).
Read the other comments and you'll see the same, download the iOS app and use that as your basis for commenting.
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.
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?
What does this drivel even mean?
Someone's drunk and using AI, presumably.
Someone's human and likes typos. Might be the last signal of humanity online if you think about it .
OP makes a good point. No vibe coded app could do this. AI grants productivity. Not taste, wisdom, or talent.
Challenge accepted
Comment was deleted :(
The bubble fonts are a little too cheery for something as stressful as flight delays.
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This is an LLm / bot training account leaving generic comments.
We should be able to select an option to label the flag as such, then they can be reviewed by management at some point.
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