Voice of Travel

If you have a flight coming up, or will have to go to the airport to pick someone up from their latest trip, this post could be very helpful.

You know how it is when you rush to get to the airport 2 hours early only to find that your flight has been delayed for another hour, meaning you’ll now have 3 hours to kill at the airport. Or even worse, when you’re due to pick someone up at 5pm, and you get to the airport at 4:55pm and circle around, and around, and around…and their flight just hasn’t landed yet. Well, while of course we will never know about all flight delays ahead of time, here are a few ways you can find out if your flight (or the flight you’re picking someone up from) has been delayed, or if the airport is having delays.

If you know either the specific flight number, or at least the general time of the flight as well as where the flight is leaving from and where it is going to, you can find out specific information on that flight. There are multiple ways to do this.

The first (and probably most accurate) is to go to the website of the airline that you (or the person you are picking up) is flying. They will most likely have a search you can do to see the flight, and will tell you if it is delayed, or should leave on time. If the flight is in the air already, it will tell you where it is at the moment, and when it is scheduled to land. I’ve always found that really fun. When I am supposed to go pick my dad up from the airport, I watch as the flight gets closer to its destination.

Another way you can find out is to go to Flight Arrivals which has informations for flights at most airlines.

Sometimes entire airports get backed up. Either their is a fog, or another weather event…or even sometimes because something like that happened earlier in the day, the whole airport could be having issues.You can check out Flight Delay Information from the Air Traffic Control System Command Center. They show the biggest airports in the country, and show if they are mostly running on schedule, or if they are behind – why they are behind. If you are looking for information on a different airport, you can just enter in the airport and get specific delays for that airport. Even though the graph just shows the busiest airports, they do have information for others as well.

At the moment I am looking and while most of the country is good, Newark Airport, JFK, and Laguardia are all delayed in leaving because of the weather and low visibility. So if you’re flying out of an airport in that area today, there is a good chance your flight will be delayed.

Just note that this will never cover all delays, but it can really help. Every time I pick someone up from the airport, I watch to make sure that the flight should be coming in on time. I would have wasted hours circling the airport if I hadn’t done this to see that the flights were going to come in late. So this should really be something you check out right before you leave to go to the airport – whether you are going on a trip or are picking someone up from theirs. Hope it helps!