While diversions are a rare occurrence in the world of commercial aviation, they do still happen. This can prompt rebooking scrambles for those who are not expecting the diversion, making passengers' onward journeys to their final destinations a more stressful affair. However, there are ways to get ahead of the game.
For example, Flighty, an all-in-one flight tracking app, has been known to give passengers the upper hand by informing them of an impending diversion before it is even announced by the crew. To learn more about the app, and how it works, Simple Flying recently had the chance to speak to Ryan Jones, Flighty's founder and CEO. We also received written testimony from Matt Varughese, a Flighty user.
What is Flighty?
Aviation today is more digital than it ever has been, and will likely only increase in this regard as time goes on. As such, passengers like you and I are increasingly relying on mobile apps as we make our way from airport to airport. Airline apps are useful resources in terms of being able to have our boarding passes stored digitally, but they aren't always the fastest when it comes to delay information.
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However, Flighty looks to give its users the edge by using data directly accessed from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which allows it to notify delayed passengers at faster speeds. The app also gives avgeeks a useful way of depicting their flying history, by providing a map of all their flights as well as relevant data. However, this all-in-one resource had to start off somewhere.
How Flighty came to be
As much as flying is a great privilege, it isn't without its challenges, and delays, avoidable or otherwise, always sting. However, in a sense, they are only as annoying as you can let them be, and it was, in fact, a delay that prompted the birth of Flighty. Speaking to Simple Flying about learning of a six-hour delay upon arriving at Fort Lauderdale Airport, the app's founder and CEO Ryan Jones explained that:
"I knew that they knew before then. And if I had had the time that morning, I could have gone to the FAA website, looked at the air traffic, looked at the weather, and I could have figured all this out. (...) If JetBlue themselves didn't know, somebody who was looking at the data smartly could have known that this flight was not going to be on time."
Faced with a six-hour wait in the airport's Chili's restaurant, Jones, who was working in app development at Apple at the time (January 2018), decided to put the time to good use. If no one else was going to make the best use of the available data to inform passengers of delays as soon as possible, he would. Jones explains:
"I literally tweeted, I said, screw this, I'll do it. (...) Who else wants to build this with me? I had a Twitter following from Apple and my previous app, and I got something like 40 replies in the first hour or two. (...) The three guys that we have working with us today came from that literal initial tweet. (...) It was people who'd had a similar frustration and knew exactly what I was talking about."
How does it work?
After around a year and a half in the beta stage of the app's development, Flighty launched in September 2019. During this time, the team worked with frequent flyers and pilots to optimize the app. Regarding Flighty's work with the latter of these groups, which saw pilots log events in minute detail, Jones explains that:
"They knew all these technicalities, and they knew all the timestamps, because they're logging everything. They could tell us afterward and say, no, we didn't land at 5:13, we landed at 5:17. But you're never gonna get that from a passenger."
Flighty's extensive development process, and access to FAA data, now means that it consistently notifies passengers of delays several minutes before airline apps or airport departure boards. With late inbound aircraft often being the cause of such holdups, it predicts these by "automatically [monitoring] that for 25 hours prior to departure." Flighty also monitors airspace mandates and their impacts.
The first to inform passengers about diversions
Being kept abreast of delays is one thing, but some of the most remarkable stories regarding Flighty involve passengers whose flights have been diverted while in the air. After all, the increasing prevalence of inflight WiFi has made such connectivity possible in recent years. Flighty user Matt Varughese told Simple Flying that:
"I was flying from Los Angeles to Atlanta on United, with a layover scheduled in Houston. About halfway between LAX and IAH, I got a notification from Flighty that my plane is being diverted, and that there was no recovery leg posted. About one minute later, the plane took a sharp banking turn back toward the direction we came from. The pilot, however, did not inform us of what was going on for about another 15 minutes."
It was only a quarter of an hour later that the pilot eventually informed passengers of the diversion, which would see the flight redirected to Phoenix due to a fuel leak. However, having had the advance notice, Matt was one step ahead. He adds:
"Flighty was able to help me get ahead of the diversion and investigate options for rebooking well ahead of everyone else. Beyond that, I was able to communicate to my friends on the ground that I wouldn’t be able to make it to my final destination that day, and that they wouldn’t have to wait around for me."
Various payment plans
Users can either add their flights to the app manually, by forwarding their booking emails, or by using a feature called TripIt Sync. Varughese sees the latter of these as "one of the biggest selling points, because I don't have to do anything other than book a flight, and it automatically gets imported." In order to access features such as this, and various other useful aspects, users can get a Flighty Pro subscription.
This can be paid for in different ways, with subscriptions costing $5/month or $50/year. Flighty Pro also has a lifetime subscription offer, which costs $250. However, a more basic free plan is also available, and the first flight that users take with this plan features the Pro aspects to show the difference. Varughese describes Pro as "wildly helpful with coordinating all my travel in one singular place."
For now, Flighty is only available from the Apple Store on iOS devices. With the team still being small, Jones doesn't yet see the development required to make Flighty available to Android users as financially worthwhile. This is because his assessments have found that iOS users are more likely to pay for such an app. That being said, he does conclude that "I want nothing more than it to be everywhere."
Souce: Flighty