Editorial Standards

Who writes and reviews the guides

The guides are written and reviewed in-house by PlaneSane, the same team that builds the scoring model. They are not syndicated, licensed from a content vendor, or generated and published without review. Every guide carries a “last reviewed” date, and that date moves when the content is genuinely re-checked — not on a schedule to look fresh.

Our expertise is specific and worth stating plainly: we work with airline on-time performance data, airport weather climatology, and connection data every day in order to build the reliability score. The guides are the written version of the same subject-matter work. Where a topic sits outside that expertise — the fine detail of aviation law, for instance — we point you to the regulator rather than paraphrase them.

Where the facts come from

• Regulatory and legal claims — what an airline owes you, refund rules, compensation thresholds — are cited inline to the official source: the US Department of Transportation, the European Commission, the UK Civil Aviation Authority. We link to the regulator, not to a summary of the regulator.
• Performance and delay claims trace to official statistics, principally the US DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the equivalent regulator datasets for the other regions we cover.
• Data claims about specific airports, airlines, or routes link to our own airport, airline, and ranking pages, so you can see the underlying numbers rather than take our word for a figure quoted in prose.
• Operational explanations — how aircraft rotations propagate delay, how de-icing or convective weather affects an airport — describe well-established mechanics of airline operations.

What we refuse to do

• We don’t invent statistics. If we can’t source a number, we describe the pattern qualitatively instead of inventing a precise-sounding figure. A specific percentage in a PlaneSane guide should be traceable.
• We don’t publish a score we can’t defend. The same rule that governs the product governs the writing: where we lack on-time history for a route or airport, we say so rather than substitute a network average.
• We don’t give legal advice. The passenger-rights guide is a starting point that points at the actual regulations; entitlements vary by situation and change over time.
• We don’t promise outcomes. Every reliability claim is probabilistic. No tool can guarantee a flight arrives on time, and a guide that implies otherwise would be misleading you.

Independence and commercial links

PlaneSane earns affiliate commission when a reader books through some of our outbound links. That relationship is kept strictly out of the editorial and the scoring:

• No airline, hotel, or booking partner can pay to raise a score, a ranking, or a mention.
• Every airline and airport is scored by the same method, on the same data.
• A guide’s recommendations are never shaped by which options are monetized — where the reliable choice is the one we earn nothing from, that’s still the recommendation.

See our Privacy Policy for how data is handled and About PlaneSane for how the reliability score itself is built.

Corrections

We correct errors rather than quietly delete them. If a guide states something factually wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it and move the review date. For a correction that materially changes the advice, we note what changed rather than silently editing the text.

Found a mistake? Contact us — corrections are welcome, and being told we’re wrong about the data is genuinely useful to us.

Review cadence

The guides are evergreen rather than news, but the facts underneath them move — regulations change, and our own data coverage expands. We re-check them periodically and when something material changes. The most recent substantive review pass was August 4, 2026. Each guide shows its own review date at the top.