Every booking site sorts by price. Almost none tell you the thing that actually decides your travel day: whether that flight has a habit of leaving late, getting cancelled, or routing you through a connection too tight to make. A $40 saving means nothing if it buys you a missed meeting, a hotel night you weren’t planning on, or a vacation day spent at a gate. PlaneSane scores flights on reliability first — on-time history, weather risk, connection safety, and price together — so the trade-off you’re actually making is visible before you book, not after.

What “flight reliability” really means

Reliability isn’t one number an airline reports — it’s the combination of a few things that each go wrong in their own way. A route can run on time most days but collapse for a week every winter. An airline can post a strong network average while quietly running one of your two connecting legs badly. A perfectly punctual itinerary can still strand you if the layover is shorter than the airport realistically allows. PlaneSane pulls these apart and scores each one:

On-time history — how the specific airline and route have actually performed across years of official US DOT performance data, not brand reputation. How to read it when you book.
Weather risk — how your airports handle the season you’re flying in, from decades of climate records plus a near-term forecast for your travel window. Which months to avoid.
Connection safety — whether a layover leaves real margin above the airport’s minimum, or sits one small delay from a misconnect. How much buffer you need.
Price — shown and sortable, but treated as one input, never the thing that sets the score.

Built on official data, not opinion

The score is grounded in the public record. On-time and cancellation history comes from certified government performance data covering several years of flights; airport weather comes from decades of observations at thousands of airports worldwide. We combine that history with a forward-looking, calibrated model for the flight you’re actually considering — and when we don’t have the on-time record for a route, we say so rather than invent a number from a network average. You can read the full method on how the PlaneSane Score works.

Research before you even search

Beyond scoring a specific flight, PlaneSane publishes the underlying record so you can dig in ahead of time. Browse month-by-month reliability and weather for hundreds of airports, on-time track records and best- and worst-performing routes for every major airline, data-driven reliability rankings, and a growing library of plain-English travel guides on delays, compensation, connections, and how to book the flight that actually gets you there.