If you are old enough, you remember a time when the only place that you could check the status of an airline flight was at the airport. Yes, the airport. Airports were the only places that had any information on flights.

Now, for you young people this sounds unimaginable. These were the times before laptop computers and smartphones. Information was not as readily available as it is now. If you had a relative that was coming in on a flight, you had to do things a lot differently back then than you have to do now. You had to call your relative (on a landline) and ask when their flight was supposed to leave. Then you would wait until you thought that their flight was close to landing before you made the long drive to the airport. Once you got to the airport, you had to find the gate where the plane was supposed to land and then you would check to see where it was. Airlines had big boards that listed flight statuses. You would hope to see ARRIVING or ON TIME, but most of the time you would see DELAYED or LATE. At that point you would try and find a seat and read a magazine. If you had some change, you could watch a portable television that was bolted to the arm of the seat. It wasn’t great, but it filled the time. Eventually the flight would land and all of the angry travelers would pile off and grumble to the baggage carousel and eventually home or to their hotels. That was the way that you tracked the status of a flight.

Technology would change all of that for the better. We no longer have to guess when a flight is arriving or departing. We don’t have to sit in a crowded airline terminal with a bunch of people, mean as rattlesnakes, waiting for an airplane to arrive or depart. Technology has given us access to all of the information that was previously only known to the airlines. We now have the ability and the means to summon this information at will, whenever we want it. Tracking the status of a flight is amazingly simple.

For example, if you are tracking a JetBlue flight, there are numerous ways to do it. If you want to call JetBlue directly, that is a good thing to do, but it isn’t the best way to track the status of a flight. The best way is to go to JetBlue.com. JetBlue’s website lists all of their flights and their current statuses. You can search by destination city or arrival city. You can also search by date and by flight number. All of this information is available to you on your laptop/desktop computer or your smartphone. If you prefer to use your iPhone, JetBlue has their own app. JetBlue’s app allows you to get all of the flight status information directly on your smartphone.

As you can see, technology has made living in these times so very easy. I can’t imagine people today having to do things the way that they were done in the past. Young people wouldn’t last.