British Airways

BA Flights Posted in Travel on 10 Jul 2008

Reviewed by Steve Litchfield

User’s rating: (6 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5)  Loading ...

Editor’s rating:

Taking the prize for the brightest and most colourful icon on my iPhone’s home screen, BA Flights falls gloriously into the ‘does what it says on the tin’ class of app. Yes, if you know exactly what URL to go to and if you’re very organised then you can find the same flight and timetable information on the wider British Airways web site, but why bother when you can get better information faster by using this handy, dedicated utility?

Every flight in BA’s extensive network is represented here, with live status updates if appropriate (with one of the example screens here showing that a flight is almost an hour behind schedule because of the current UK snow). The main way ‘into’ the data is via the ‘Home’ screen, with two of the three large, tempting buttons giving ‘Arrivals and Departures’ and ‘Online timetables’, the two most common types of lookup: either you’re checking what flights are about to leave (because you’re wanting to travel) or meeting someone else at an airport; or you want to check BA’s scheduled timetables because you’re wanting to travel at some point in the future.

Once past the two opening buttons, the application divides itself into four main modules: ‘Timetables’ and ‘By route’ offer very similar search parameters (’From’ and ‘To’) but the former shows just the original schedules and from generic cities while the latter also shows live flight status and breaks things down to the actual airport names (e.g. ‘London Heathrow’). ‘By flight’ is the module to use if you know the flight number that you (or a person you’re meeting) is travelling on, while ‘By airport’ looks up matches based on one specific airport. In other words, many different but intuitive ways of getting different subsets of BA’s data.

A ‘Favourites’ feature works well for regular travellers. Having found a specific flight within BA Flights, just tap the ‘Save’ button next to it and the flight will appear in the ‘Favourites’ screen. This also works well by having a ‘Refresh’ button, so that, racing for a flight, you can hit this every 10 minutes to get an update on delays – an automatic update would have worked well here. Switch away to a different application and BA Flights disappointingly doesn’t remember where you got to, making the ‘Favourites’ function even more vital.

Together with relevant ‘Book flights’ shortcuts (although in real life you might like to shop around for deals before accepting the first price offered by this app!), there’s no doubting the quality of the underlying data here though and special mention should be made of the romantic ‘blue sky’ backdrop graphics – hey, even if your actual flight is delayed by an hour and firmly on the concrete, at least you’ll feel something of the freedom of the open sky!