Flighty 4.0 adds delay details
The excellent flight-tracking app Flighty has been updated to version 4.0 with a bunch of new features designed to anticipate and explain flight delays.
The new version analyzes more aviation data to understand delays caused by airport issues and late-arriving aircraft. (That covers about 65% of delays—Flighty isn’t able to explain some other sorts of delays… at least not yet.) The idea is that Flighty will be able to give you a heads-up about these issues, and explain them, perhaps quite a bit before your own airline does so.
I’ve been using Flighty for years and I’ve already seen Flighty beat the airports and airlines by quite a bit—I’ve been informed of delays, gate changes, and even gate assignments long before any push notifications from official airline apps or PA announcements at the gate. It’s gotten me the jump on changing flights and allowed me to proceed to European gates at airports that hide the gate number until the last minute. This new update should add even more data to Flighty’s toolset—Flighty’s developers say that it could be as much as six hours in advance.
Flighty isn’t cheap—it’s a $48/year subscription—but I consider it the best in its class. And it’s got a pretty sweet deal for less frequent fliers: you can subscribe for $4 for a week, so you can just use it when you’re traveling and then turn it back off.