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.

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joezydeco 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Flighty routinely tells me about cancelled flights before any other app or the airline itself.

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trillic 6 hours ago | parent [-]

FlightAware and Flighty are usually within seconds of each other and always ahead of the airlines.

	▲	lobochrome 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		(except United)

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danpalmer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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zeroonetwothree 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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bombcar 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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”

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newscracker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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dhosek 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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FireBeyond 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	strange_quark 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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toast0 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you do with that information though?

	▲	bronco21016 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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lelandbatey 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree, I find that the "MiseryMap" from flightaware is less "pretty" but much more informationally dense. https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/