<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by guiming_miao:
One Friday, I was connecting at DTW, from ATL to PHL. ATL-DTW arrived on time, checked monitored for connection flight, decided to walk over there, somewhere around A21, I heard last call boarding for DTW-PHL, which is the previous flight being delayed, but the display monitor clear did not show that. I guess once it passes its scheduled departure time, that flight information is gone. Is this correct? If it is true, how can I find out if there is an early flight being delayed so that I may take advantage of?
Thanks.
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If a delay is known in advance of the scheduled departure time, the estimated time should be displayed and should remain on the monitors until the time displayed or until updated. On most (or at least the ones I am familiar with), once a posted departure time has past, the flight will drop from the monitors within 10-20 minutes. SOOOOO, answering your question: if the delay was not known until departure time on the flight you mention, it's possible the FID (Flight Information Display) was not updated and it disappeared from the system.
Some airports (including the NW hubs) have a FID system which receives some information from they ACARS system onboard each aircraft and others (including the one at LAS) receives information (at least for arrivals) from a program similar to FlightTracker.