United Airlines has quietly switched on a new feature in its mobile app called 'My Flight Journey', and it turns your past United bookings into something like a pilot's logbook. Every sector you've flown with the Chicago-based carrier is listed, complete with flight times, miles flown, and even the specific aircraft liveries involved — a detail that will delight anyone who has deliberately booked a flight just to catch a special-painted plane.
The feature also digests your flying habits. It counts how many aircraft models you've been on and names your most-flown type, and it shows how flight times have shifted over the years on routes you've repeated. It's the kind of thing that's useless for getting you to Denver any faster, but oddly compelling once you start scrolling.
There's a wrinkle, though. The feature looks strikingly similar to Flighty, a popular independent flight-tracking app — so much so that United CEO Scott Kirby has previously said of Flighty: he told his team they should just go and buy it, keep running it as-is, and staff it with people who believe anything is possible. Flighty itself responded with some deadpan humour on X, joking that on the advice of its legal counsel at Ryanair it wished to formally clarify it had not been acquired by United, adding that the airline had "only acquired a copy machine." The comparison is especially noticeable against Flighty's Android interface.
Not quite a total copy, mind. Users have pointed out that United's version leaves out delay statistics — hardly surprising, given that neither the airline nor its frequent flyers want a running tally of exactly how often things ran late.
The new tracker arrives hot on the heels of another United app upgrade. In early September, timed for the busy Labor Day weekend, the airline rolled out automatic standby monitoring: instead of repeatedly refreshing the app hoping for an earlier seat, United now watches availability behind the scenes and texts you when a spot opens up. The airline bills it as an industry first, and for anyone who has spent a layover glued to a standby list, it's a genuinely useful change.
Why should a traveller care? Neither feature changes whether your flight gets in on time, but together they signal where United is heading: an app that knows your history, anticipates your next move, and nudges you at the right moment. If you fly United even occasionally, open the app and check your own flight journey — the aircraft types and miles add up faster than you'd expect. And if you're a standby regular, the text alerts alone are worth having notifications switched on for. For aviation enthusiasts, the livery detail is the fun part: you can now prove, with data, that you really did fly on that retro-jet paint job.
