I’ve spent the last half hour playing around with various different websites trying to figure out where is the best place to go to get real time data on how long flight delays are going to be at various airports.

www.flightstatus.com seems to be the best website I’ve found. You can sign up for free and then access all flight information for any airport. I just looked at O’Hare and found out that the overnight flights (before all of the information from Heathrow and London was announced) were on time except for a JAL flight from O’Hare to Atlanta, which was delayed 61 minutes.

I’m now checking all flights from 9-noon today. There are some very serious delays of 81 minutes to Charleston, 49 minutes to San Francisco, 65 minutes to Philadelphia, 50-55 minutes to Los Angeles, 100 minutes to Austin, TX, 49 minutes to Omaha, and then a bunch of flights to everywhere are delayed 35 minutes or less. The good news is a lot of flights are “green” meaning they’re currently scheduled to go out without a delay.

There are a handful of flights that have been cancelled from O’Hare including the American Airlines flight to London this morning, and 3 flights to Hebron.

In terms of wait times for security, www.flightstatus.com is projected a pretty smooth run with wait times of up to 30 minutes expected by 2pm and 3pm in Terminal 3, which is the American Airlines terminal. There’s no way to know if this is accurate or not. Yet.

I’ll keep looking. BTW: You need to register (it’s free) at FlightStatus.com in order to see this stuff. It’s the best I’ve found thus far.

Published: Aug 10, 2006