How to track flights on iOS with FlightBoard
Tracking flights while on the go is a great way to time picking up a loved one, or your arrival at an airport for a departure. FlightBoard offers a simple method of tracking flight arrivals and departures in a way that looks darn good.
Tracking flights and timing either your arrival to pick someone up, or your arrival at the airport for a departure flight can be difficult given how often flights are delayed. There are plenty of apps for your iPhone out there to choose from, as we have already shown you. FlightBoard provides you with another option, allowing for quick flight search by airport, and presenting it in style.
FlightBoard is available in the App Store for $3.99 (iTunes link) and is a universal binary, meaning it is made for both the iPad and iPhone.
After you have downloaded and installed FlightBoard, you will be asked to grant the app access to your Location information. Doing so will allow FlightBoard to pull up local airports. You can either then select a local airport, or search for a different airport by name.
Once you have found the airport you want to get flight information from, tap on it.
From there you will be presented with the familiar look and feel of flight status boards found in airports. In the top-right corner of the app you can toggle between Arrivals and Departures.
From left to right you have airline, flight number, gate, departure time, and status. The Status shows up in a few different colors. Green means the flight is on time, blue means the flight has arrived, orange indicates a delay, and red is for a flight that has been canceled. Again, a color code you should be familiar with if you frequent airports.
To better organize the flights, you can tap on any of the column titles. In the screenshot above, the flights are now organized in alphabetical order from A-Z by destination. The same can be done for any column.
Tapping on a flight will bring up more information about that flight, as well as options to share the flight information through e-mail, SMS (iOS 5 on the iPad uses iMessage for the SMS feature), or social sites.
Tapping on the flight again will collapse the information dropdown, taking you back to the multicolored list.
FlightBoard--while it may lack some of the more popular features such as push alerts for flight status changes, or even an interactive map view--is a fun app to use to quickly view the status of a flight.