Flight+ Is A Perfect Traveler's Companion
Flight+ ($2.99) by International Airport Flight Track Technologies is a beautiful companion for your travels (separate iPad version also available for $4.99).
Once I launched the app, I was immediately reminded of Apple's own Reminders app. Flight+ has the same notebook paper appearance, font, and feel, but I'm still very impressed. The visuals in the app are simply stunning, and even though I may not always be using this app, I think I'll keep it around just because it looks so good.
In fact, because of the similarities to Reminders, I could think that this app was designed by Apple themselves. The app also uses a gesture-based navigational system, where you can simply swipe left and right to navigate between panes, very similar to Sparrow's system.
Flight+ is divided into five different views, which can all be accessed via the bottom navigation bar. You have Flights, Airports, Airlines, Maps, and Settings. Each one will have its own sub-menu as well, so there’s a lot to cover.
In Flights, you can view All My Flights, Flights En Route, Scheduled Flights, and Past Flights. When you want to add a flight, just tap on the “+” button to bring up the “Add Flight” view. From here, you can input some information (all optional), including date, departure airport, arrival airport, airline, and flight number. If you don’t input anything and hit “Search,” the date will default to today’s date and you’ll get a random airport that is near your location.
Search results will be displayed in three categories: En Route, Scheduled, and Past. Adding it will place it in the appropriate category in the Flights view.
Once you add a flight, you can view details about that specific one. Flight+ won’t skimp out on any bit of information, as you can view flight details (current status, departure and arrival times, and more), a map of the flight, configure alerts whenever an event happens, airplane info, specifications, and even seat maps if available. If you have any additional notes you would like to add, it is possible with the Notes option in Flight Detail sidebar. If you are looking for any bit of information regarding a flight, then this app will have it.
The Airports tab has everything to do with airports, as you’d imagine. You can search through all airports, view the nearest and recent ones, and even save favorites. The app contains a database of all 16,200 airports in the world, and they are all sorted alphabetically.
When you find the airport you want, you are able to view a wealth of information, just like you can with flights. One of the most useful bits of information provided, though, will be the Average Delay bar. This is a great way to see how notorious an airport is for delays. The bar has five slots, and if there are red bars, that’s the average delay. I’m not sure what the exact statistic is, but I would think it is something like “X” amount of flights out of five are delayed.
Other information about an airport includes info, facts, departures, arrivals, weather, terminal maps, and flight map. Chances are if you want to know a certain thing about an airport, Flight+ will have it ready. The weather forecasts for each airport are also extremely important to have ready.
Airlines view follows the same format — users can search airlines, view recents and favorites. You can view information and facts about a selected airline, the flight board, and flight map. Additionally, if they have a Twitter account, you’ll be able to inspect that too. The Maps view allows you to see all of your flights on the map, en route, or airports (favorite and major).
Flight+ comes with several settings to optimize the experience. A Minimal Data Traffic Mode toggle is there, which will reduce the data traffic of the app to a minimum — great for those with data caps. You can also turn on the auto-delete flights, change map type (Satellite by default, but Classic, Hybrid and Terrain are available), switch between temperature and distance units, use knots for speed, sync with Calendar, and even log in to Facebook to share your flight information with friends and family.
Since Flight+ utilizes push notifications to alert you of flight information, you can toggle what events trigger a notice. There are a lot of options, so prepare to be pelted with notifications if they're all on. If you are a user of TripIt, you can log in to import your TripIt flights directly into Flights+, eliminating the need to do everything manually.
The only negative that bothers me about the app is the fact that the developer wants to separate the iPhone and iPad versions, and charge separately for them (the iPad version is $4.99). If you want both, it will cost you $7.98. Both apps do the same thing, except the iPad version makes use of the larger screen estate. It would have been nice to see this as a universal app for $4.99, as I believe that's pretty reasonable.
But I think an app such as this would be better on the iPhone anyway, so if you have to pick one version, get the iPhone one.
If you travel frequently, then you will definitely want to check out Flight+. It’s beautiful and packed with features and information no traveler should be without.
