Flightstats is a very useful website that also has an iPhone & Android app.  I’ll be doing several posts to show how to use it to best advantage.  For this post, we will look at flight delays.

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The Global Delay section in the “Delays” tabs will tell you which flights are being cancelled or delayed around the world.  I typically start monitoring this a few days before my flight to beep track of any potential problems.

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Next I would click on the Asia Pacific tab to see if there are any problems in my upcoming flights.  I often do connect through Singapore so seeing it at the top of the Departure Airports list would set off alarm bells and prompt a further investigation.

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Unfortunately Flightstats only collects exact delay information on US airports but there are other things we can look at.  Click on the SIN hyperlinked in blue, then click on the Departures tab once you are on the SIN Changi page.

It defaults to the current time with upcoming flights.  There are no imminent delays and I want to see why SIN was at the top of the list.  I can change the time by either clicking on “Change Airport” or by changing the time slot which I highlighted in yellow.

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Going back to 3pm, I can see a Garuda flight was 6 hours late.  Most other flights were on time or just a few minutes delay.  That’s good news, the problem wasn’t affecting the entire airport like a weather, air traffic control or similar problem.  But if I was traveling on Garuda tomorrow, I would be calling them to double check the late flight wasn’t going to impact on my flight.

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I’m not on Garuda, let’s say I am connecting to Turkish Airlines to fly to Istanbul.

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Luckily, both the flight to Istanbul and the flight from Jakarta are on time.  At this point, I would check the arriving flight from Jakarta since apparently TK does a IST-SIN-JKT-SIN-IST itinerary.

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The incoming flight from IST is 16 minutes late which is not a huge problem at Changi.  And the plane I will be on which originates in Jakarta is arriving on time so barring any unforseen complications, I can be 99% sure of an on-time flight!