Flight delays cost travelers a lot of time in 2025. Flighty, a flight-tracking app, just released its first Global Passport Report, analyzing 22 million flights its users took this year. The total time lost to delays adds up to 3.9 million hours, so far, based on all flights that arrived more than 15 minutes late.
The figure for the entire year should be even higher, as this report covers flights tracked between January and November 2025. Flighty monitors real-time flight data and alerts users when their flights get delayed, often before airlines make announcements. I’ve found it to be consistently quicker than airline apps for flight updates.
More: Flying Soon? Airlines Are Quietly Cracking Down on Lithium-Ion Batteries
The Most-Delayed Airlines
Flighty ranked airlines by what percentage of their flights arrived late. Globally, Ryanair took the title, at 29%.
For U.S. carriers, the top five most delayed are:
- Frontier Airlines: 28%
- JetBlue Airways: 25%
- Southwest Airlines: 25%
- American Airlines: 24%
- Alaska Airlines: 23%
Fidgeting on the Tarmac
Flighty also introduced a new measurement called "Get Me Off This Plane." It's the time between when a flight was scheduled to arrive and when passengers actually exited the plane. This stat included delays from runway congestion, taxiing, waiting for an available gate, and holding patterns. It's the gap between the plane touching down and the door opening that can be so aggravating for restless travellers. The metric is a more realistic way to understand the total travel time, versus what the airline schedule would usually give you.
More: Apple Joins Google to Provide Digital ID for Flight Check-in
Flighty is my favorite travel app. I used it during my first international trip this year, and getting the data about flight delays, gate assignments, and more was very helpful. For a first-time international flyer, this well-designed app was a godsend. Flighty does have a ridiculous amount of flight data, but organizes it well.
The free version is a pretty solid travel companion, providing flight status, weather data, aircraft details, and basic notifications about your flights. The best features are behind a paywall, such as baggage claim details, 25-hour inbound airplane monitoring, and the Live Activities and Dynamic Island integrations – which show the live status of the flight on your phone's lock screen. The paid version costs $4.99 a month, billed annually. Flighty also has a $299 lifetime license option.
Any Flighty user can get a free year-in-review feature, called Passport, that shows your personalized stats. It breaks down your total flights, miles traveled, time in the air, hours delayed, and data like flight time, distance, routes, and more by airline and airport. It's similar to Spotify Wrapped but for air travel. My Flighty passport, for example, shows I flew over 6,661 miles this year, on 10 flights.
Bottom Line
The delay rankings show significant variation between carriers, which can be useful if you want to plan your travel to minimize delays. The "Get Me Off This Plane" metric is also handy because it’s not the kind of travel data that’s typically quantified, especially when accounting for travel delays. If you like to use tech to prepare for your travel, this app is one I would highly recommend.
[Image credits: Sean Captain/Techlicious via ChatGPT and Nano Banana]
