Transcript
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Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Tuesday, November 25th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. As you prepare for holiday travels, there's a flight tracking app that's managing to notify flyers about del and cancellations well before the airlines themselves. We'll take a look at how it all works. Plus, is it time to roll back the clock on smartphones? Actor Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad fame seems to think so. He recently joined a WSJ Tech Live panel on minimalist tech. We'll hear part of that conversation later in the show. But first, flight tracking app Flighty somehow regularly manages to beat airlines when it comes to alerting passengers for FL delays and cancellations. The secret to this seemingly impossible feat? Data. That's according to our Science of Success columnist Ben Cohen, who has been relying on the app for his own travels and joins me now to explain how it works. So, Ben, tell us about Flighty and how it came about.
C (1:20)
Flighty is the world's most popular flight tracking app. It is an app that is a live flight tracker, but also does a whole lot more than that. It gives you delay updates and cancellation alerts and tells you basically everything that you could possibly want to know about any flight that you might take. And amazingly, it actually came about during a flight delay. Ryan Jones, the founder of Flighty, was stuck in an airport Chili's in Fort Lauderdale on New Year's Day in 2018. He was there for four hours when he decided that enough was enough and he was going to build exactly the product that would have allowed him to avoid the mess that he was in. And so ever since 2018, he has been building out Flighty, and every time there is chaos in the skies, they get a surge in downloads. And so the past two weeks, after the FAA mandated a reduction in air traffic across America, a lot of people turned to Flighty to find out exactly what was happening with their flight and how they might be able to navigate themselves to avoid chaos and make traveling just a little bit less miserable.
B (2:29)
So it seems like data is a really important part of this app. Where does Flighty get all its data?
C (2:35)
You're right. So they pay for the best data they can find. And what Ryan Jones says is if you have good data, we will go out and get it. So There are lots of data providers, everything from private to government, FlightAware to the FAA. They get data from around the world. And what they do is they have evaluated that data and they feed all that data into their own models and so that they can figure out what is happening with your flight. And the thing that makes Flighty really unique and what a lot of people get the most value from is that they will tell you what's going on with your flight, often before the airlines themselves. You might think, like, that's impossible. Like, how is this private app getting you this information before the company that you are asking to ferry you across the sky in this gigantic tube? What Ryan Jones says is that that is the priority of Flighty. It's not the priority of airlines to tell you everything they know as fast as humanly possible. They have a lot of other stuff they have to worry about.