Share your flight status with a link

What the person you send it to sees

The link opens a single page about the flight, and that page checks for news while it is open, says how old its information is, and stops once the flight has landed. On it:

• What matters right now, as a headline: for example how long until departure and from which gate, or that the flight has landed.
• The times on each airport’s clock, written the way the reader’s own phone writes times, with the original time struck through when a flight is running early or late.
• A map of the route, with the aircraft’s last reported position and how long ago it was reported. Where that position is FlightAware’s estimate rather than a report from the aircraft, the page says so.
• The airline’s name, the cities, the distance and how long the flight takes.
• The baggage belt, once the flight has landed and the belt is known, so the person collecting you knows where to wait.
• Who shared it: the display name you choose in the app, if you set one.

What it never shows

Your booking or confirmation code, your seat, your cabin class and your full name are not on the page. They are not hidden on it; the page is never sent them in the first place. Neither is any label you have given a flight you are watching. The link is not a way into your account: whoever has it can see that one flight, and nothing else.

A link that ends, and one you can take back

Each link stops working on its own three days after the flight arrives, so an old message does not go on showing your travel forever. You can also take a link back before then. Every link you have made is listed in the app under Links you’ve shared, with whether it still works and whether somebody is following the flight, though never who. Revoking one is a tap, and it stops the page and any follow made from it.

Following a flight in the app

If the person you send the link to has FlightDex, they can follow the flight instead of keeping a browser tab open. Following is free. When you have FlightDex Pro, anyone following in the app gets its alerts, whatever their own plan, once their phone allows FlightDex notifications: the moments that matter to someone at the other end, the departure, the takeoff, landing soon, the landing, the arrival at the gate, and a cancellation if there is one. A friend’s flight never wakes them during quiet hours; the news waits in their notification shade. Read more about FlightDex alerts.

What it costs

Sharing is free. Creating a share link costs nothing, opening it is free for anyone, and so is following the flight in the app. Its alerts come when the person sharing has FlightDex Pro, as above; the person following needs only the app.

Sharing is about a flight while it is in the air. For the record of the flights you have taken, see the FlightDex flight log and Passport.