I’m at the airport to pick up a couple of friends, just back from a week in Spain. Adam asked me last week if I could pick him and his fiancée up from the airport. Somehow, we didn’t exchange a flight number along with the airport and arrival time, so I had no easy way to see if anything changed. Thanks to the web, this was no problem.
A search for Dulles Airport brought up their website. A search for today’s arrivals from Spain revealed the flight number and scheduled arrival time (which turned out to be about 30 minutes later than Adam and I discussed last week). I put the flight number into flightstats.com, and not only did it give me both segments of the return flight, it updated the scheduled arrival time and provided a near real-time map of their flight as it approached.
So instead of showing up way too early, I got to Dulles just a few minutes before Adam called to let me know they’d landed. I was able to do all that (and write this post) with my iPhone 3G.