Where your plane is
Austin airport right now
Weather
Southwest departures from Austin today
Just left
Coming up
The evidence
Everything below is the data behind the number: this flight's record, how Southwest has run at Austin since Friday, and what could still go wrong.
Why this number
How the number is worked out
It starts from how close the assigned plane is to Austin: about 90% when it is still two or three flights away and on time, 94% with one flight to go, 97% once it is in the air to Austin and 98% once it is at the gate.
It drops if Southwest posts a long delay (4 points at an hour, 8 at two hours, 12 at three), if the FAA slows or stops Austin traffic (3 to 4 points), if Southwest starts cancelling many Austin departures (5 to 12 points), or if one of the plane's earlier flights is cancelled (35 points).
The starting points come from Saturday, the worst recovery day, when about 9 in 10 Southwest routes out of Austin still flew. It is an estimate from public data, not a figure from Southwest.
This flight's last 11 days
It flew on 10 of 11 days. The one miss was Friday, the day of the ground stop. On 4 of the 10 days it flew, it left the gate 30 or more minutes late.
Gate departure times from Austin, Central time. Source: FlightAware.
Southwest at Austin, Saturday against today
Each bar is one part of the day, sized by how many Southwest flights were scheduled out of Austin.
Saturday, Nov 14
Today
On Saturday, 17 of 74 flights were cancelled by flight number, but 10 of those flew the same route with the same plane under an 85xx number, usually within the hour. Only 7 routes did not fly. The real cancellations mostly came after hours of rolling delay: the 5:40 PM to San Jose slid almost five hours before it was cancelled.
Your flight flew on Saturday, 2 hours 23 minutes late.
If Southwest says cancelled
Look for an 85xx flight to Oakland before you rebook. On Saturday most cancellations at Austin were renumberings. This page has not confirmed that Southwest moves passengers over automatically, so check the app.
Southwest nonstops from Austin to the Bay Area today
The 9:15 PM to San Jose is the only later one, and it was cancelled on both Friday and Saturday nights.
What could still go wrong
- Austin weather. Storms moved through this morning and the FAA listed a ground stop as possible until 5 PM. A stop holds arriving planes at their origin, so it usually means delay, not cancellation.
- The plane's earlier flights. It has to finish its other flights before it reaches Austin. A cancellation upstream would leave Southwest looking for another plane.
- The crew. Duty-time limits are what turn long delays into late cancellations. Crew schedules are not public.
- A long rolling delay. That was the warning sign on Saturday. If the posted time keeps sliding, the risk goes up.
What happened on Friday
The FAA stopped all departures in the United States for about four and a half hours on Friday, Nov 13, from 2:54 PM to 7:19 PM Central, after a communications failure hit every en-route air traffic control center.
The Transportation Department blames a newly installed router on the contractor-run telecom network, part of a copper-to-fiber upgrade at a site in southern Arkansas. The root cause is still under investigation, and officials say there is no sign of an attack.
About 8,000 flights were cancelled on Friday and thousands more on Saturday. Air traffic control is back to normal. What is still recovering is airlines getting planes and crews back where they belong, and the FAA administrator said airlines expect full schedules by Sunday night.