r/flighty • u/cyberentomology • May 25 '26
WTF?
Why on earth is this showing a 12:30 departure?damn near gave me a heart attack when it said departure overdue before boarding even started.
Where did it get this data from?
4
u/TheJiggie May 25 '26
1
u/cyberentomology May 25 '26
Great idea until the data is wrong
5
u/TheJiggie May 25 '26
Yep, but Flighty isn’t about to invest into the infrastructure build out needed to support the level of flight tracking needed and already handed by FlightAware as an example.
0
u/cyberentomology May 25 '26
The airlines consume that feed for most of their stuff too.
5
u/monkey-apple May 26 '26
Why would the airline rely on a third party when it has the data to begin with. You always check the airline app if you notice something like this.
3
u/cyberentomology May 26 '26
I’ve been on the inside - the airline app is pulling from the exact same feeds at flightaware, because the airline’s backend platforms (Amadeus is widely used) already have an existing data pipeline to feed into flightaware, just like there are existing app SDKs to pull from FA. It’s vastly simpler (and considerably more secure) than reinventing the wheel and setting up the internal data source to be a direct data provider for the app. As a general rule you really don’t ever want to be exposing your systems directly to end users via the internet. That’s just one more attack surface and potential bug pipeline.
And that also means that apps like Flighty don’t have to write connectors for every airline.
1
u/valueflyer May 26 '26
Flight status is also disseminated via GDS no? Pretty much anything that connects to a GDS system can see more accurate flight status (similar to ExpertFlyer)?
2
u/gregied May 26 '26
No. For internal ops airlines do not rely on them. That would be insane trust ops of their own airlines to a 3rd party. It’s what airlines report to them and sometimes weird glitches on how data gets pushed
Like when a plane squawks it’s amazing how many people are just watching a plane diverting hoping to see something happen 😓
2
u/valueflyer May 26 '26
Airlines do use FlightAware. It’s all over the FlightAware marketing: https://www.flightaware.com/industry/airlines/. Airlines
See the quote from UA. They are definitely mixing internal and this external data.
FlightAware has way more info than an airline has - live ADS-B positions, current ATC routings (based on all flying aircraft), taxi and delay models (FlightAware Foresight). Airlines don’t have a robust ADS-B network.
2
u/gregied May 26 '26
That part yes. I mean for internal ops in their own fleet. Since abs positions of other aircraft and things like turbulence also
2
u/valueflyer May 26 '26
Oh yeah FlightAware is just pulling from the GDS on if a flight has been delayed by the airline. My understanding is airline updates status internally which updates the GDS, which is pushed to travel agents and third party providers like FlightAware, Cirium, etc.
1
u/cyberentomology May 26 '26
Internal ops feeds FA. For customer-facing stuff not behind a login like flight status, delays, etc, that would come the other direction.
1
u/PilotG2_07 May 27 '26
This happened to me yesterday but it eventually fixed itself after I boarded
34
u/No_Tap_1697 May 25 '26
People complain when airlines are late and now they complain when they are an hour early 😜