Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

July 2007

Title: FlightStats
Publisher: Conducive Technology
URL: http://www.FlightStats.com
Cost:free
Tested: Tested: July 10-22, 2007

The Context

There are hundreds of online services that offer real-time tracking, telling you about the status and expected/actual departure/arrival of flights, and that's it – unless you subscribe to an historical performance indicators data set, as in FlightAware. This has, however, the inconvenience of not using the standard, most widely used IATA airport codes. It is as if an indexing/abstracting database would use only the CODEN but not the ISSN code.

Some have a few odd features and even more odd "facts" about the flights. FlyComm, for example, asks you to enter first the arrival airport then the departure airport, which would not be a big problem but it seems to have confused the designer and/or the software. For my search on July 18 at 6:40 p.m for flight UA 85 from LA to Honolulu, the summary page indicated that the plane is in flight with a 10:02 p.m arrival time. So far so good.

After clicking on that entry, the detailed flight page claims that the current altitude of the flight is 0 feet, and the ground speed is 0 mph. This does not look like an in-flight plane. A closer look at the top of the page indicates that the detailed page refers to flight UA 85 to Los Angeles from Honolulu. United flights to LA are even numbered (UA 84, UA 86). Then, a little below the header, the information refers to the departure city as Los Angeles and the date is July 19, the next day. This is mighty confusing.

Many of the online services are limited to U.S. or U.S. and Canadian flights, like FlightArrivals . Some provide current (but not historical) information about airports, but then surprise me by not listing Honolulu, which drastically decreases its appeal to me, a resident of the city. FlightView calls its service U.S. Airports but apparently does not consider Hawaii to be part of the country.

Of course, this may not bother you, and if your most common departure and arrival point is, say, Fargo in North Dakota, and your information needs are satisfied by current flight and airport information, then such a service may be your ticket. However, if you care about knowing who sells the ticket at the best price, and what has been the performance record of the carrier with that cheap ticket in recent times, then these limited services are not enough. Enter FlightStats which provides much information (some of them through efficient cooperation with independent partners), and it enlightens the users instead of discombobulating them with sloppily compiled data, or by providing only a blindered view.

The Content

The summary of this service in the About page of the company may not suggest that this is a wonderful ready reference source for the public interested in facts related to air travel. It says "Travel managers, integrators, shippers and air operators need FlightStats, the only complete, real-time source for flight status and objective flight performance information." While this is certainly true, there is more than meets the eye. FlightStats also provides very useful information and tidbits for smart travel planning even when the passengers have limited flexibility in their choice of the day, time of the day, and/or destination airport (because of few alternatives, meeting schedules, connecting flights, etc.).

Anyone who goes through the increasing inconveniences and experiences the rapidly declining service quality of air travel —especially in the U.S. and Europe— should use FlightStats to make the travel less painful and less expensive and to make educated decisions about when to fly, which airline to fly with and not to fly with, and how to get the best fares and mileage deals.

Obviously, this is not nearly as critical for short flights as with long flights. For me, every trip is long (except for the inter-island trips because performance indicators make it clear that Aloha Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines are among the few airlines with almost perfect on-time arrival records).

In reviewing FlightStats I will use as examples data for my upcoming trip from Honolulu to Hanoi (with some stopovers and side trips). I know that it is not the typical route for the typical reader of this column, but it provided very good examples for both of its best features and for the ones which still have room for improvement. More importantly, the same functions and information (and in some cases more) are available for flights within the U.S. and for most intercontinental routes originating from the U.S. —you just need to change the departure and arrival airports to get the first results directly pertinent to you, and then follow the links for the rest of the statistics related to your preferred routes and flights.

Carriers and Routes

Often, the first question is which airlines cover a route. You could go to the online travel agencies to get this information but you need to jump through the hoops of filling out the search form just to learn that there is no information for the route you are interested in. For example, Travelocity does not report any flight originating from Bangkok, even if it is not only a most interesting destination, but also the perfect hub —with top notch hotels well below $100 and gourmet dinners below $20— for flights to dozens of cities in a four-hour flying time radius in any direction. Travelocity leads you on a wild goose chase with its message and boiler-plate suggestions.

FlightStats provides an easy way to review all the flights originating from the selected airport of a city. You just type in the name of the departure and arrival city, and get a complete list of the flights scheduled for the day you search. True, these flights may not be the same on your actual date of travel, but for a first mother-in-law kind of look-over, you get a very good picture, literally.

Actually, there is less than meets the eyes as the code-shared flights dilute reality. In the case of Bangkok-Hanoi, out of the 15 flights listed, 11 are just code-shared flights, one of the many ways most of the airlines like to impress passengers. The good thing is that in FlightStats you can spot these immediately as the software identifies these pseudo-flights with a caret symbol. Even better, you may make them disappear, and get a clearer picture by clicking on the hide code-share flights button.

I will discuss the beauties of the software later, but I want to call your attention right here and now to the many hotlinks (indicated by the usual blue text) on every screen. The tables and charts are also very characteristic and efficient tools for visualizing the usually overwhelming numerical and textual information at a glance.

For rounding out this query to get an impression about the carriers flying that route and the spread of departure times, you may use the pull down menu to choose the next or previous day. While most flights are daily, Air France is not, and these one day back and forward look-up alternatives help you with such constraints.

It is clear from the screen shot above of the previous day's statistics for the route that tracking is not possible with all the airlines. Still, you get a fairly informative picture with minimal input about the options. As a bonus, you also see that timeliness was very good, actually just exceeding by one minute above the lower threshold of 15 minutes for considering a flight late. Overall information for that day's performance about an airline that catches your interest in the flights roster is just a click away. The impression is pretty bad about Air France with only 47% of all of its flights departing on time on the given day, but there are two caveats in interpreting the daily departure stats. One is that you don't judge an airline by a single day's statistics. The other is that departure delays are not really as relevant as arrival delays because very often 20-30 minute delays can be and are made up for during the flight.

I personally don't find Air France an appealing choice (even if it happens to have the second best fare for the Bangkok – Hanoi route), but I have modest experience with it. Much more importantly, the largest airline-quality ranking service, SkyTrax, which is not a source for FlightStats (yet), gives the airline a score of four (out of maximum five) based on surveys of various quality criteria. This is remarkable because only three other of the well-known but rapidly deteriorating European airlines (Austrian, Lufthansa and British Airways) get that relatively high score, earned mostly by Asian and Middle Eastern airlines.

Indeed, when you look up the arrival statistics for Air France flights for that day, the picture shows a much better but still not good enough on-time arrival rate of 70%. The extent of delays is also much better than the departure delays in each of the 15-30, 30-45, and 45+ minutes categories. FlightStats shows only the absolute numbers but if you are willing to calculate the percentages you get a better picture. I did so for the daily arrivals and departures of Air France for July 20. It showed the following arrival versus departure delays in the above three categories: 12% vs. 25%, 6% vs. 13%, and 8% vs. 15%. This is a big difference, and it may be a good idea to make the arrival not the departure statistics page be the default.

Historical performance data

Historical performance data are also available by airlines, routes, flights and day/time -based on the performance data of the previous two-month period, in our case from May 15 to July 15. The airline performance summary chart reconfirms that the Bangkok – Hanoi route performance profile, being similar to the overall profile based on the 132,151 flights of Air France in the previous two months. You can see the breakdown for the delays in a small but equally informative table. The good news is that average delay is only 22 minutes. The median delay would be also useful. The bad news was for those who had to endure the longest, more than 16 hours delay, certainly an outlier.

What you are most likely to be interested in in the performance category is the historical performance data for the route and the flights (if there are more flights for the route such as this one for Thai Airways, which has two flights per day). Air France on-time performance for seven flights on this route in the past two months is 71%, lower than that of Thai Airways with 87% on-time average for 122 flights in the same time period, but the average delay of 22 minutes for Air France is of no concern. You would be happy if most of the other European and American carriers' performance would come close to this.

It is not a good sign that departure and arrival data are not available for the specific flight, but it is not necessarily a red flag. In case of the flights of Thai AirAsia (part of the Malaysia-based low cost carrier AirAsia network), its other flights originating from Bangkok had very good performance. The Singapore-Bangkok data with two flights in two months, and both of them canceled, are certainly not correct (the only error I found in FlightStats). Thai AirAisa has several flights a day on this route, I flew it only twice both ways and it was on time by the book.

Being able to learn about the performance records of low-cost carriers of Asia (ignored by most online travel services) is a huge asset of FlightStats. You may have never heard of Singapore-based JetStar Asia so you may be reluctant to choose it based on its wonderfully low price alone. I can make a notarized statement that it is a high-quality operation, with civilized check-in and other services (seat selection, free snack), and almost perfect punctuality. We had six flights with them a year ago to Yangon, Siem Reap and Bangkok, and all of the flights were on time. Apparently, its performance remained top notch and so did its extraordinarily good fares, such as this return fare between Singapore-Bangkok at 20-23% of the price Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines or Thai Airways would charge you.

Fare comparisons

Unfortunately, you would not find this price in FlightStats. It does not have its own fare information system. It uses, and elegantly incorporates into its interface a special version of the very good FareCompare system. However, this special version has the limitation that for checking published fares the point of departure or arrival must be in Canada or the U.S.

In my long-haul flight example, the trip is split into two legs (Honolulu – Bangkok, and Bangkok - Hanoi) because the Honolulu-Hanoi single ticket fares are not good. If the fare is acceptable then the layovers are absurdly long in cities where I don't want to leave the airport, let alone to lay over, and take over 30 hours each way instead of a more reasonable 20 hours. Split ticketing can be a better alternative, using Bangkok as a stopover, then the low cost carrier Thai AirAsia. The result for the Honolulu Bangkok leg which can be limited by the users dynamically to their choice of airlines still has the incredibly absurd fares by American Airlines, and equally absurd suggested routing. Its "cheapest", $3,000 fares on its web site includes a not so little 10-hour detour to Los Angeles on the way back from Bangkok to Honolulu. To its credit, AA offers an even more complete endurance test on both the originating and the return flights at a similar price by taking you from Honolulu to Los Angeles before really heading to Japan then to Southeast Asia. It is like flying from New York to London via Vladivostok.

The major U.S. airlines charge 50%-80% more than the much better Taiwan-based China Airlines. The greed of American Airlines is the most appalling. Its coach (!) fare of $2,717 is more than three times as high as that of China Airlines, which has an on-time performance rate of 78% for the past two months (lowered by its poor performance on the Taipei-Anchorage route) for its most-flown 20 destinations. The same score for American Airlines is 68% with double flight cancellation rate, and almost double the excessive delay rate of those of China Airlines.

For the price of that coach ticket on American Airlines —connecting through Tokyo— you can fly that route on real business class of China Airlines, make one stopover in both direction (to visit, for example, Hong Kong, Macau, and, say, Shenzhen), have genuinely polite flight attendants, enjoy good food and in-seat audio-video. The fares at American Airlines don't reflect the typical seasonal price fluctuation (low, shoulder and high), one ultra-high fare will do because of its name recognition (earned much earlier for its once good performance and service, such as the short-lived increased leg-room). The company got spoiled rotten by loyal customers even if there is not much left for loyalty for this airline.

United's fare is not that abnormally higher on this route, probably because the company, which came out of bankruptcy, made some nasty moves and a lot of money. First, it declared some of its regular economy seats Economy Plus instead of labeling the regular and uncomfortable domestic economy seats Economy Minus and give a discount for the torture.

United Airlines (along with most other U.S. airlines) eliminated business class between Hawaii and the mainland and relabeled that section first class, even though most of those domestic business class seats were inferior to the economy seats of All Nippon Airways, EVA, and especially Emirates Airlines.

Then United announced six months ago that after 18 months of inactivity your accrued miles will expire, and they stopped the inactivity clock ticking from June, 2006. When United lured in customers to join Mileage Plus, the inactivity grace period was 36 months. The contract, of course, entitled United to change almost anything and everything to its liking, except perhaps your mother's maiden name. Many of the 48 million Mileage Plus customers will loose their accrued miles.

Apparently, United now makes it hard to spend your award miles. For example, there is not a single day for using standard, let alone saver, award miles until that deadline to redeem your award miles for a Honolulu-Hong Kong flight. By the way, the Hong Kong route is widely promoted by United at discounted price (but not for award miles). Many customers may have wasted their time trying to find award seats for other destinations and probably gave up, forgiving United its debt. It appears as if United would have designated the next six months a black-out period (behind the scenes), using the euphemism of capacity control. I have been waiting for a reply from United for this absurd situation for several days, but probably only a class action suit notice not a plain e-mail could get its attention and bring it to its senses regarding this unfair practice for using award miles. I would not be surprised if many of its alliance partners which include the best airlines of the world, such as All Nippon, Asiana, or Singapore Airlines —all of them far above United Airlines in service quality and business practices— would find the alliance embarrassing, and would secede. FlightStats provides excellent reference information to explore the travelers' alternatives.

THE SOFTWARE

The interface of FlightStats is among the best ones that I have seen at online travel related sites. The process is very intuitive, the tabbed system makes the choices and available options obvious. If you still miss some features, sooner or later you will discover them because there are so many, systematically placed, well-captioned links to get from one function to the others. There are clear explanations for the use of different functions, as well as for clarification of terminology.

I was particularly pleased with the information about the Published Fares function, which alerts users that the published fares are not always the least expensive fares, which are usually available only from the airlines' own Web sites for those who search those site directly. This is little known, and quite often some airlines have even better prices in their own site. With other airlines it does not matter. For example, going to the Web site of the airline does not make any difference for the appalling fare of American Airlines, but at China Airlines there is an even better fare than the one that is far the best already.

The integration of third-party information is very well done. The travel alerts and advisories issued regularly by the state departments and foreign offices of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand stream through as if they were part of FlightStats. Equally well integrated is the TravelDeals look-up provided by SmarterTravel, or the Frequent Flyer Promotions provided by MileMaven.

The fare comparison process is also smoothly integrated, following the design, layout, typography of the other FlightStats menus, and only the result page takes the user to another page – opened in a new window to allow simple return to FlightStats.

There are some software features that should be used by all the sites which deal with flight schedules, and massively confuses many users. It is the appalling code-sharing practice, which mostly serves the purpose to make the big-name partners look like they are providing worldwide service from cradle to grave, from small towns of rural America where not even the Greyhound bus would stop to the poverty-stricken metropolises of Africa. FlightStats provides an option to hide the redundant entries for the code-share (= fake) flights, and makes the result list tighter. I wish this hiding option would be available on all the result pages.

There are many other useful features and data at the impressive FlightStats site which are worth discovering, such as the Frequent Flyer Promotions, or are promising, like the Airport Scores. The latter offers a well-structured input form for users to enter their scores for numerous features. It is, however, of limited value as of now because of the relatively few evaluations. A similarly structured scoring system by passengers would be welcome also for service quality (with flights aggregated by routes and airlines). Alternatively, such data available from SkyTrax (at least at the airline level) could be imported into FlightStats. Even in its current shape, FlightStats is an excellent resource to help make your flights less unpleasant on traditional, less and less appealing airlines, help you and make an educated choice based on hard data and substantial volume of opinions of frequent fliers about low-cost carriers that provide much more bang for the buck than the dinosaurs of the airline industry.

— Péter Jacsó