- 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”
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Challenge accepted
- The bubble fonts are a little too cheery for something as stressful as flight delays.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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/
- Flighty is a great app. I travel a lot and use it all the time to manage my flights. Highly recommend.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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
- 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 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.
- I think the map is biased towards airports with the most disruptions, not the largest.
- 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.
- 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
- A website requiring me to download their app for detailed report on certain airport is not worth my time.
- Notice a lot of Canadian airports are yellow right now. Is this normal?
