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've had once cancellation in my life so I see why the need hasn't presented itself very loudly.
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.
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!
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.
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.