FlightTrack Review: See Flights in Midair

Travel is something we do whether we like to or not. The issue is not the traveling itself, but organizing it. There are many great websites for making itineraries and other plans, but these leave out one major part: the flight. When you’re on your way to the airport when it’s snowing, you want to know if your flight will be canceled, delayed, or on time. You also may want to know if there’s an earlier flight you could possibly get on. Well, this is where FlightTrack comes in.

FlightTrack’s coolest feature is definitely the Map View. This allows you to see where a flight is during its flight; and it works very well. It uses a service called FlightView to get the data, which can be used without the app. To get to the Map View, one only has to click the Map tab item in the navigation bar when a flight is selected.

Another big issue in flying is baggage claims. A number of times the airport tells you to go one place when your baggage is somewhere else, or maybe you just forget what claim number it is. With FlightTrack you can easily check baggage claim numbers; gate numbers; and scheduled, estimated, and actual departure times. Just create a search, find a flight, and see all of its info. You can also shake the phone to pick a random flight. I’m not sure exactly why you might want to do this, though. If you want to save a flight for later, just click on the Save button. You may find that some other flight-tracking apps have a few more features, like creating itineraries, or more general searches.

As said above, FlightTrack allows you to do searches. You must know at least some information about the flight to do a search, unless you just shake the phone. I find that the search is good if you know what you want, but it can get a little annoying. Sometimes you just want to see a list of flights out of a certain airport instead of searching for specific flights. But this also means that your list will be vary narrow after you search. And, with its 751 included airlines and 4530 included airports, maybe seeing a list of flights would just be overwhelming.

FlightTrack retails for $4.99 on the App Store and there is no Lite edition (I don’t know how there could be anyway). For a frequent traveler it is a great tool and gives you a fair number of features. Even for an infrequent traveler it can be a nice tool to have, just in case. And hey, $4.99 wouldn’t even buy you a meal at the airport that you had to buy because you didn’t hear your flight had been delayed 5 hours.

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