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Flight-Status Alerts Aren't Always So Alert

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By SCOTT MCCARTNEY The Wall Street Journal

Published: October 22, 2007

Updated: 10/21/2007 08:44 pm

Northwest Airlines Flight 661 from Newark, N.J., to Detroit on Sept. 27 arrived at 12:20 a.m. the next day - four hours late. But Northwest's 'flight status notification' service offered on its Web site painted a different picture: It sent one notice showing the flight arriving 12 minutes early, at 8:05 p.m.

In these days of long delays, flight tracking and flight-status alerts have become important tools for travelers. Flight-tracking services such as Flight Explorer.com and FlyteComm .com tell you where the flight is, often placing it on a map and sometimes overlaying weather radar, and what time it should arrive.

Flight-status alerts, offered by most airlines and services such as FlightStats.com, fire off e-mail or text messages to phones or BlackBerrys so you know of changes.
Savvy travelers use them for early warning of problems, so they don't miss gate changes or can be first on the phone to rebook if necessary. And friends and family of travelers rely on the updates to know when to pick up people at airports or whether they'll arrive in time for appointments.

You'd think big airplanes with scores of people on board would be easy to track, but it turns out there's great variation in the many different services. We tested different flight trackers and flight-alert services, comparing airline offerings with other Internet sites.

Some big shortcomings became clear: Several services had difficulty figuring out what happened to flights that were held at gates for long delays, or departed a gate and then sat waiting as long as several hours for takeoff.

Airline flight-alert services vary in utility, too. Some offered only limited updates, and quit tracking a flight once it left the gate because it had 'departed,' even if it sat for hours waiting to take off. A Southwest Airlines Co. flight left Chicago Midway 73 minutes late, but Southwest's departure alerts never notified people of the delay. Alerts sent for the flight's arrival at Omaha did pick up the delay, but not until an hour before landing.

Continental Airlines Inc. was the only carrier we tested that actually sent alerts when planes took off. Other airlines said they believe gate departure and arrival is the pertinent information customers want, since there are so many variables in between. But it's the uncertainty that causes people to want more information.

The most useful source of more information was at FlightStats.com, which collects data from airlines, airports and the Federal Aviation Administration and sends frequent updates. A big advantage of FlightStats status alerts is that the service sends messages when planes actually take off and when they actually land. On some flights, we received eight different updates from FlightStats, compared with only one or two from an airline.
Flight trackers - Web sites that picture the location of a plane instead of sending you information - also occasionally had a hard time finding flights. Take AirTran Airways Flight 1699 on Wednesday, a 4:31 p.m. Newark-Atlanta trip that pushed back from the gate more than four hours late. FlightView.com, a fairly sophisticated flight-tracking site from RLM Software Inc., was less than helpful: It listed the flight's status as 'Call Airline.'

FlyteComm.com knew something wasn't quite right: It listed the flight's current altitude as zero and its current speed as zero, but still showed it arriving on-time. Flight Arrivals.com correctly figured out that the plane had not yet departed, but still showed its arrival at 6:48 p.m. - 10 minutes early. FlightAware.com and FlightExplorer.com couldn't find the flight - FlightAware.com listed the previous day's trip, saying the flight had already landed, and FlightExplorer.com said 'Flight Not Found.'

The problem, according to the companies, is that they rely on data from the FAA, and the feed they get doesn't start for a flight until it takes off.
Flight trackers offered by ticket sellers Expedia.com, Travelocity.com and Orbitz .com were no better at tracking the AirTran flight. None of the sites include AirTran in their airline-tracking offerings.

Travelocity said the problem was a 'bug' being worked on. Orbitz says it doesn't have data from several airlines, including AirTran.

FlightStats.com, which offers both an alert service for phones and pagers and computer-based real-time tracking, knew that the AirTran flight had left the gate in Newark but wasn't yet in the air, and it offered an accurate estimated arrival time - the flight was more than three hours late. But FlightStats, a unit of Conducive Technology Corp., wasn't infallible in our testing: It missed some gate changes on an American Airlines flight.

Another option: A new service that launched last week, 1-800-FLIGHTS, lets you call that toll-free number for flight updates, based on the FlightStats data.

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