Flight status blues

Summer is upon us on the East Coast. Together with the warmer weather come the all-too-often thunderstorms that wreak havoc with airline schedules at the end of the day. These storms also show that airline flight tracking doesn’t always work.

This is a story about how current flight status reports don’t always tell the whole story. In this case the US Air site was misleading and even FlightStats.com reported conflicting information.

The flight that I was tracking was US 1046 from Charlotte to Washington Regan. It was scheduled to depart Charlotte at 5:50 p.m. and arrive in Washington at 7:10 p.m. Unfortunately a string of strong thunderstorm cells passed right along the flight path.

Now, since I was in Washington, I knew this was a real weather event and that obviously flights would be delayed, so I signed into the US Airways website flight status reports.

Ahah! There was flight 1046 listed as delayed with a projected time of departure of around 7 p.m. Eventually, the US Air flight status showed that the flight status was “departed” at 7:17 p.m. I relaxed and figured that I should get a text from the airport around 8:15 or so assuming all went well.

I checked briefly at around 8 p.m. to see how things were going and saw that the reported touchdown was now 8:45 p.m. I figured that the plane was turning circles in the sky waiting in air traffic to land.

I then received, at about 8:15 p.m., a cryptic text message that said “tarmac.” I assumed that meant the flight had landed a bit earlier than expected, so I headed to the airport. Along the way, another text message made it clear that the tarmac to which my friend referred was not in DC, but Charlotte. She was still on the runway in Charlotte!

“Departed” on the US Airways website simply indicated that the plane has pushed back from the gate. “Departed” in the flight status language doesn’t mean “taken off from the runway.”

I turned around and returned home and, this time, signed into flightstats.com. The initial display looks very similar to the USAirways site. I forget the specifics, however, the information showed that arrival was within minutes when I knew that the plane was still sitting on the runway in Charlotte.

I then dug deeper into flightstats.com and clicked on “flight tracker.” There it was! Finally an accurate report, “This flight has not left the runway.” Using the flight tracker I could see that US 1046 eventually took off at about 5 minutes before the hour. The site also listed the flight time as 80 minutes, so I could plan on getting to the airport in time make the pickup.

Strangely, as the flight tracker section of flightstats.com showed the plane flying past Roanoke, another window next to the map still showed the scheduled landing as hours earlier. And in the end, the flight time turned out to be only 59 minutes. (I was using the free version of flight tracker. Perhaps, the paid iPhone version was more accurate, but I don’t know.)

The lesson learned here, is that with extreme weather, don’t depend too much on flight status reports being correct. Have whomever you are scheduled to meet, send you clear text messages letting you know when they have taken off. If there is a lengthy delay, most pilots allow passengers to text those waiting for them.

These flight status systems are getting better. However, extreme weather can spin the systems out of control.