Flighty Airports
153 points
3 hours ago
| 12 comments
| flighty.com
| HN
exidy
1 hour ago
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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.

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kylehotchkiss
1 hour ago
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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
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ZeWaka
1 hour ago
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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/

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chiefgeek
3 hours ago
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Flighty is a great app. I travel a lot and use it all the time to manage my flights. Highly recommend.
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hmartin
3 hours ago
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Love Flightly, one of the best apps ever. Beautiful design + incredibly useful info.
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sneak
2 hours ago
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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.

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exidy
1 hour ago
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> 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.

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ZeWaka
1 hour ago
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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
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exidy
28 minutes ago
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> Departure time is easier because of https://www.fly.faa.gov/edct/showEDCT

If you're in the US!

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aresant
1 hour ago
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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?

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eagerpace
1 hour ago
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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
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pinkmuffinere
3 hours ago
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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.
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phinnaeus
3 hours ago
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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

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chupchap
2 hours ago
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Haha I came in to write the exact same thing. Such a weird choice
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jerlam
2 hours ago
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I think the map is biased towards airports with the most disruptions, not the largest.
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nixass
1 hour ago
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A website requiring me to download their app for detailed report on certain airport is not worth my time.
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LeoPanthera
38 minutes ago
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Flighty is an app. Not a website. The website just tells you about the app.

I think you probably know that though.

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jt2190
2 hours ago
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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!
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Esophagus4
2 hours ago
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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.

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ryeguy_24
3 hours ago
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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.
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reader9274
3 hours ago
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I have about 3000+ bookmarks in my KaraKeep instance
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enos_feedler
3 hours ago
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Notice a lot of Canadian airports are yellow right now. Is this normal?
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jryio
3 hours ago
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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.

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amiantos
17 minutes ago
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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?
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jryio
12 minutes ago
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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?
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enraged_camel
10 minutes ago
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What does this drivel even mean?
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bombcar
6 minutes ago
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Someone's drunk and using AI, presumably.
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jryio
5 minutes ago
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Someone's human and likes typos. Might be the last signal of humanity online if you think about it .
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Atalocke
10 minutes ago
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OP makes a good point. No vibe coded app could do this. AI grants productivity. Not taste, wisdom, or talent.
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alberth
1 hour ago
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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
1 hour ago
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Flighty routinely tells me about cancelled flights before any other app or the airline itself.
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trillic
1 hour ago
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FlightAware and Flighty are usually within seconds of each other and always ahead of the airlines.
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lobochrome
36 minutes ago
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(except United)
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danpalmer
1 hour ago
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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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bombcar
1 hour ago
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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
1 hour ago
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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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FireBeyond
52 minutes ago
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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
43 minutes ago
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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.

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strange_quark
21 minutes ago
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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
35 minutes ago
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What do you do with that information though?
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lelandbatey
1 hour ago
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I agree, I find that the "MiseryMap" from flightaware is less "pretty" but much more informationally dense. https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/
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gaintchicken
1 hour ago
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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.
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sefrost
20 minutes ago
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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.

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jryio
1 hour ago
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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.

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enraged_camel
7 minutes ago
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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?
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annexrichmond
1 hour ago
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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.

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xattt
2 hours ago
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The bubble fonts are a little too cheery for something as stressful as flight delays.
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Gagarin1917
1 hour ago
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Challenge accepted
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jesterson
2 hours ago
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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).

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ezfe
2 hours ago
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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.

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