Flighty Now Tells You When to Leave, at 14,000 Airports Worldwide

Twenty minutes before you need to go, your phone says “Leave Soon,” and it already knows the drive to Heathrow will take about 30 minutes. That is the scene in Flighty's own launch image for When to Leave, which the flight-tracking app released on November 11, just ahead of the Thanksgiving rush. It turns the oldest question in travel, how early to leave for the airport, into a personal timeline built from predicted traffic and the way you actually move through a terminal.

The Mental Math, Done for You

Until now, the answer meant working backwards: departure time, minus the security line, minus the drive, minus a margin for whatever might go wrong. Flighty does that arithmetic in one place. A traveler adds a starting location under the flight's details, and the app pulls Apple Maps drive times based on predicted traffic, so there is no need to jump between apps.

The timing keeps adjusting. Flighty checks the drive often, sends a “Leave Soon” alert 20 minutes before the final “Time to Leave” alert, and sends an update if traffic gets significantly worse. It also flags local public holidays at the departure airport, when roads and queues tend to fill up. When to Leave is built for drivers, but anyone taking a train or a taxi can type in their own travel time, and Thrifty Traveler found the default plan adds a 10-minute buffer that can be adjusted.

“Now we're helping beyond the flight with a personalized plan from door to departure, bridging travel time and airport routine in one simple timeline.”— Ryan Jones, Flighty founder and CEO

The drive, though, is only half of the timeline.

Two Hours, or Your Own Routine

For time inside the airport, Flighty starts from a default of two hours for U.S. domestic, Schengen or short-haul flights. If you have flown from that airport before, it suggests your usual timing instead. Travelers can keep airport time as a single block or split it into up to nine activities, from parking and returning a rental car to check-in, security, passport control and the lounge.

That detail answers a question Marques Brownlee asked less than half an hour after the launch: “If this can time my arrival to the airport with when boarding starts, this is huge.” Flighty's screenshots list Boarding as one of the steps in the plan, so a traveler can build the timeline around it.

The case for the feature is that most people guess badly. A survey by Sendmybag.com, cited by Flighty, found that more than half of travelers arrive at the airport too early. An hour spent at the gate is an hour that could have been spent at home, and an app that already sits on the phones of so many fliers is well placed to give it back.

So who gets it, and what else arrived in the same update?

14,000 Airports and a Search Box for Past Flights

When to Leave is part of Flighty Pro on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and it covers more than 14,000 airports worldwide. New users can try Pro on one flight for free. Flighty pitches it at anxious travelers, families who need extra time and business travelers trimming every minute of the trip, end to end.

The same update, version 4.12, adds Past Flight Search, one of the most-requested features from users: type “longest flight this year” or “via OSL” and it finds the trip without scrolling through years of history. Friends can now also compare each other's Flighty Passports, with countries visited, distance flown and time in the sky.

Flighty built its name telling travelers about delays, often before the airlines did. Now the trip starts at the front door, with a plan that already knows when to leave.

What people are saying

Flighty@Flighty

“Introducing When to Leave! Know when to head to the airport with a personalized plan from door to departure. 🚗 Travel time with predicted traffic 🚦 Get traffic alerts & leave reminders 📅 Plan for holiday traffic & queues 🧳 Make time for check-in, security & the lounge Get”

2.0K75Nov 11

Marques Brownlee@MKBHD

“@Flighty If this can time my arrival to the airport with when boarding starts, this is huge”

70417Nov 11