Travel tools · Iteration 46 · 8 September 2026
Will It Be Late?
Your flight is on time until it isn't — and the aircraft that will fly it is usually somewhere else first. That's where the answer is. Type a flight number for today or tomorrow and the tool looks up the plane the airline has assigned, how late its inbound leg is running, how many minutes this flight number typically makes up in the air (measured over its last ten legs), and how much of the turnaround is left to absorb it. What comes back is a range with a confidence and its denominator in words: "likely 10–20 min late · inbound from LHR left 45 late · this flight makes up about 17 min in the air, over 8 of its last 10 legs." Under any flight in your itinerary, the same line appears from six hours before departure.
- It never says "on time." A quiet inbound aircraft is good news, not a promise, and the tool says exactly that.
- FlightAware's own figure comes first, always. Ours sits under it and can only add to a delay the airline has already announced, never subtract.
- Every estimate is graded afterwards. The next day the tool checks what the flight actually did, and once it has twenty results it prints its own track record on the card.
Data from FlightAware. Each check is one of your monthly allowance (30; five times that for beta testers). The method, step by step, is in the manual under Travel tools.