Ok, so I tried a search and can't get the darn thing working...

Lately (crappy weather in the area) I've been incredibly frustrated by the airlines' inability to provide accurate flight status.

For example, I'm sitting at the Marine Air Terminal, staring at a Delta Shuttle display board that says my flight is departing on time at 7:30pm. It is 7:15pm. The plane that is supposed to be my flight (the 5:30pm from Boston) hasn't left Boston yet. What do you think the chances of my flight being on-time are? That's what I thought.

So, I'm trying to figure out if there's something out there that would let me easily connect from a PDA (think Blackberry) and tell it that I want to monitor the real-time status of a particular flight (say the plane that is scheduled to be the one for my flight), so that I can get a better idea of flight status. I found a few websites that will let me type in an airline/flight number and will give me real-time status, but they are fairly rich (not PDA friendly) and don't do updates well.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Depending on the type of phone / PDA you have (A BB for example), can browse regular HTML sites. I have a phone running Windows Mobile 2003, so I just bookmarked the flight status pages so I don't have to wait for the transfer of the first page of the web site onto my phone. this works about as well as anything I've found.

The bigges tproblem you'll probably find is that even the web sites don't always have the latest information. In your example above, until Delta officially delays your flight, everything will show on time. I don't know of a web site which connects inbound flight delays to the next flight that tail number is supposed to fly.

Here's a list of US Airlines WAP Sites that I have:

AA - http://www.aa2go.com
DL - http://mobile.delta.com
CO - http://wap.continental.com
NW - http://wireless.nwa.com
Alask - http://wireless.alaskaair.com
UA - http://www.ua2go.com/

I also lifted a few Intl sites from the Best WAP Sites thread
BA - http://wap.britishairways.com
LH - http://wap.lufthasa.com

There! You've hit the nail on the head. That is really the missing link in this whole thing -- that and the airlines themselves being slow to update their systems.

So, is this information out there somewhere? Anyone?

PS. Thanks for the list. It's pretty handy.