Will my flight be delayed?
Nobody can promise you an answer, and an app that claims to predict delays is selling you a coin toss. What is true is that most delays are already visible an hour or two before they are announced — usually in the aircraft that has to land before yours can leave.
Why the departure board is the last to know
An airliner is not waiting at your gate all afternoon. It is flying four or five legs that day, and yours is one link in that chain. If the aircraft leaves its first airport twenty minutes late, that twenty minutes has to be absorbed by the turnarounds in between — and a turnaround has a floor, because cleaning, refuelling, boarding and paperwork all take the time they take.
So a late morning in Lisbon quietly becomes a late evening in Manchester, and everybody on the evening flight finds out at 20:05 when the board flips. The information existed hours earlier. It was simply on a different flight number to the one printed on your boarding pass.
Airlines are also slow to publish a delay on purpose, because announcing one commits them to it and passengers wander off. The consequence for you is that the board is a record of what has been decided, not a forecast of what is about to be.
The four signals worth checking before you leave for the airport
The inbound aircraft
The single best predictor. Find the plane that will operate your flight, see where it is now, and compare its arrival with the turnaround your departure needs.
Read more →An alert that finds you
Delays, gate changes and boarding calls pushed to your phone as they are published, so you are not refreshing a page in a taxi.
Read more →Weather at both ends
Low cloud, strong crosswinds and thunderstorms slow the flow of traffic into an airport long before anything is cancelled.
Read more →The air on the route
Rough air rarely delays a departure, but it changes the altitude and sometimes the track, which is where a scheduled flight time quietly grows.
Read more →What an hour of warning is actually worth
It is rarely worth arriving late on purpose — the delay can shrink as easily as it can grow, and a gate that closes on you is a far worse outcome than an hour in a terminal. What the warning is genuinely good for is everything around the flight.
It is the difference between rebooking a connection while seats still exist and joining a queue of two hundred people after the announcement. It is telling whoever is collecting you before they set off rather than while they circle the car park. It is deciding to eat now instead of discovering at 22:00 that everything airside has closed.
FlyBud does not predict your delay, because that is not an honest thing to sell. It shows you the aircraft, the turnaround, the weather and the published schedule in one place, and it tells your phone the moment any of them move.
Flight delay questions
Does FlyBud predict whether my flight will be delayed?
No, and it will not pretend to. It shows you the things a delay comes out of — where the inbound aircraft is, how much turnaround time is left, what the weather is doing at both ends — and it pushes a notification the instant the airline publishes a change. Reading those signals is a much better guide than any confidence percentage.
How do I find the plane that will fly me?
Track your flight in FlyBud and it looks up the aircraft assigned to it, then shows you where that aircraft is right now and what time it is due in. If it is still in the air an hour before your departure, your departure is already in trouble.
How much turnaround time does a flight need?
Roughly 30 to 45 minutes for a short-haul narrow-body and an hour or more for a long-haul wide-body, depending on the airline and the airport. If the inbound lands twenty minutes before you are scheduled out, the delay is arithmetic rather than bad luck.
When does a delay get announced?
Usually much later than it is known, and often in stages — fifteen minutes, then another fifteen. Airlines avoid publishing a long delay in one piece because it disperses the passengers they need at the gate.
Do I get an alert if the gate changes too?
Yes. Gate changes, boarding, delays, cancellations and the baggage belt all send a notification, and gate changes in particular tend to reach your phone before the screens in the terminal are updated.
Know before the board does.
Add your flight once. FlyBud watches the aircraft, the schedule and the weather, and tells you the moment any of them move.