Information Madness

Analysts predicts that Air Passenger traffic in India will be doubled in five years and triple in nine years from now. The growth in the domestic and international cargo traffic is also estimated to reach 4.5 per cent and 12 per cent over next 10 years.

The prediction is that Air passenger traffic will grow but what about the facilities that should be available to those passengers? How many airports in India have their websites functional? A lot of fake websites with those airport names are up and mislead passengers when they really need some information for their inquiries.

I know government is working on improving the airports and somewhere they forget to provide public information. I recently wrote about Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport which is getting revamped and high-tech. After the privatization, we are seeing lot of private airlines which gives lot of information about their flights. Flight arrival and departure information, flight booking, online checkin etc. etc. Jet Airways, Kingfisher airlines, air sahara are few to name them. But there is no single place where you can just log in and check the flight status. First of all you need to check the airline, then visit their website and if you are lucky, you might find "flight status" link on their website.

So while I was looking for a single place where I can find Indian domestic flights statuses, I found out about this website called FlightStats.com, a website by Conductive Technology Corp. Though the site is not specific to India and Indian flights but it does have detailed information about Indian airlines, indian airports and upto date indian domestic flight information.

The site has lot of great features like flight alerts, flight ratings, historical flight reports, flight tracker etc. You can also find Airport ratings, Airport information, Airport Parking and list of all the airports in India on the map. They have incorporated google maps api to show this on the map.

The site also has a mobile portal where you can check all the flight/airport related information from your mobile phone on the go. If you want to pick up someone from the airport or want to check the flight status from your mobile, mobile.flightstats.com is the site you want to check.

Last but not least, if you want to put these features on your website or blog, flighstats provides free site widgets that you can put on your site. You need to register with them first to get those widget codes. So Domestic Flight Status.