First time here? Check out the site's "greatest hits" or read a random post from the archives. Feel free to ask a question, and consider subscribing to the latest posts via RSS or e-mail. Thanks for visiting!

Yesterday, the Consumerist featured a letter from a person frustrated by US Airways’ website. It wasn’t the booking engine or the new site layout that got her juices going: It was the flight status page:

I hit the US Air website. It said that the flight had taken off 3 minutes before it was scheduled to and had landed exactly on time, although the status was “UNKNOWN”. For the next hour that “UNKNOWN” label, as I refreshed and refreshed, worried me more and more. I’m picturing all sorts of horrible things. Still no call from husband. I start planning my life as a single mother, when finally at 3:20PM, I got a call from him, saying he was finally on the ground. I asked how that could be since he’d taken off on time. He told me that the plane did not leave on time, and that it was about 11AM before they took off.

While most seasoned travelers would say the letter-writer overreacted, even in the current culture of fear, the author probably had some reason to be scared. After all, when airlines experience “incidents” they often remove the flight from the airport monitors and online status pages. But of course programming errors happen, and thankfully the “unknown” flight was just delayed.

What should the upset letter writer have done? How do you cross check this information? Outsource.

Never just rely on the airline’s own website for flight status. Instead, check out FlightAware, the site devoted to tracking all flights in American airspace. You’ll see the actual time of takeoff, landing, a neat map of the flight route, and some dorky data on speed, altitude, etc.

But most importantly, FlightAware reports two different pieces of information than most airline websites: Wheels-up and wheels-down times. Airlines categorize flights by the times the plane is out, up, down, and in. “Out” and “in” refer to the departure and arrival at the gate. “Up” and “down” refer to the takeoff and landing on the runway.

Instead of fretting about the “missing” flight on the US Airways site, the reader could have seen that the plane was delayed, but airborne.

If I’m picking someone up at the airport, I always check both the airline’s status page, and then check FlightAware to see how far out the plane really is.

Extra bonus: With FlightAware, you can even track private jets, charters, and UPS or FedEx flights — though I’m not sure you really need to track your shipment that way… (It’s probably especially handy for private jets.)

Creating a free login on the site also lets you automatically refresh the live map of the actual flight route. You also get access to historical wheels up/down times, (not just the gate departure/arrival times) if you want to see how much time the flight actually spends in the air. The maps are fun — hours of dorky procrastinatory fun!

tags: travel | FlightAware