When I’ve taken flights with Ryanair, I’ve almost always found that Flighty won’t have critical information. I suspect this is because of how Ryanair files their flight information and/or the provider for flight data.
- Terminal and gate information often only shows up in the Ryanair app, and not Flighty. At best, the terminal information shows up a few hours before the flight, but gate info almost never does. (I don’t know what this is like statistically across all flights, just the ones I’ve flown.)
- Inbound flight tracking doesn’t work, because the tail number often only shows up after the doors are armed and locked after gate departure. I suspect Ryanair doesn’t actually file this information via ADS-B until gate departure. I’ve been able to “manually” track the inbound flight by looking at flight number minus/plus 1 digit, which will typically be the inbound aircraft on most of their outstation airports. (This technique does not always work at their major bases like Dublin, Luton, Stansted etc where the inbound flight is not necessarily from the same airport where outbound is flying to.) Statistically, I don’t know how true this is across all Ryanair flights but I wonder how generically this technique could be used to track inbound flights with a low degree of confidence.
- I also suspect that Ryanair doesn’t always consistently “close” a flight as finished on ADS-B, because I find after landing, Flighty will keep tracking the aircraft position for the NEXT flight the tail number is doing as the current flight.
Ryanair is obviously a very big airline in European short haul (although I’m not sure how popular it’s among Flighty users). It seems their web/mobile
apps have data not otherwise found on flight tracking apps because they have these
custom APIs they publish flight info through, and nowhere else.