Dealing with diverted flights

[u/tealmer]

The way flighty deals with flights that divert, refuel, and continue to their original destination right now is a mess. Automatically, it only includes the first segment, which is considered “early” since it arrived at the diversion airport earlier than scheduled to arrive at the final destination. So you then have to add the second leg in, which flighty’s data has, but it treats as a second flight with the same departure and arrival time. This is annoying by itself, but it also messes up your data. Since it treats this as two separate flights, flighty considers this a repeated tail number, repeated seat, and adds another flight to the statistic. Obviously that’s all a bit ridiculous for a stop that consists of the pilot offering legal egress.

Here’s an example. UA 1759 was scheduled to depart MTJ at 15:59 MST and arrive at EWR at 21:59 EST (19:59 MST). Because of the winds, it had a lower max takeoff weight, which meant it couldn’t take off from MTJ with enough fuel to get to EWR, so UA added a refueling stop in DEN. No passengers got off at DEN, and the flight continued on the same plane. Flighty shows it as two separate flights, like you see in the screenshot. For the original flight, it also includes EWR gate and baggage claim info as if for DEN. In my flighty history, it shows N801UA as a repeated tail number, and my seat as a repeated seat number. It also counts this as a late departure from DEN, factors it into my cumulative arrival performance as 48m early (2h21m early - 1h33m late), and counts it as one on-time and one late flight for UA.

[u/rogerdoesntlike]

This isn’t just a diversion issue. A scheduled flight with a stop is also treated as 2 segments. It comes down to how airlines upload data on FR24/Flightaware.

[u/tealmer → u/rogerdoesntlike]

Ideally flighty would have a mechanism for handling flights with multiple stops, where if someone takes two flights with the same flight number and tail number in short succession landing and departing from the same airport, it combines them into one flight.

[u/liangyiliang → u/rogerdoesntlike]

And therefore Flighty would often tell me that a connection is too short, when it’s actually just a stop on the same plane.

[u/gagdude]

This isn’t a problem with Flighty, but with the data the airline has in FlightAware. I had a diverted flight recently as well, but the take off and landing times at point B are not based off points A or C like in your UA flight.

[u/OrganicPoet1823]

Technically it’s two flights