Where our data comes from

Where does every number on this site come from?

Every number on this site comes from the airport operator's own public page, and nowhere else. We read the page a normal visitor sees, and we show you the figure the operator published alongside the time they published it.

We use no aggregators. Not another airport information site, not a review site, not a forum. Those are where you find the question, not where you find the answer. That rule comes from getting it wrong once on a sister site, where a claim taken from a forum comment reached publication and had to be corrected on two pages. What we refuse to repeat matters as much as what we publish.

What do we refuse to publish, and why?

We refuse to publish any figure we cannot attribute to a named source and a time. In practice that means four things.

• No "current" wait time unless the operator published that number, with their stamp beside it.
• No terminal assignment we have not checked against the operator's own website. A wrong terminal strands somebody.
• No estimates, no averages, no "typically around" filling a gap where a real figure is missing.
• No display advertising, and no call-center phone number dressed up as help.

Other sites in this category rank first while publishing numbers nobody can source. One tells you its figures refresh every ten minutes, then gives a typical range for the whole day and names no source for it. We read that page on 2026-08-15. The difference between us and them is not better data. It is what we do when the data is not there.

How do we read a wait time without breaking anyone's rules?

We read a wait time the way any visitor's browser reads it, by loading the operator's own public page and taking the number they chose to show. We do that slowly and cache the result, because we are a guest on somebody else's infrastructure.

Two things we never do. We never call a private feed using a key lifted out of a website's code, even where that key sits in plain sight. And we never load a page from an operator who has told automated visitors to stay away. Two airports do exactly that, and both get a page saying so rather than a number we went around a locked door to get. A site that routes around an operator's access controls has no standing to call its numbers trustworthy.

Which airports have a live source, and which do not?

The list below is the current state of every airport we have researched. It is generated from the same file our software reads, so it cannot drift out of date while the site says otherwise.

Airports missing from this list have not been researched yet. That is different from having no source, and we keep the two apart.

What happens when a source goes down?

When a source goes down, the page shows you nothing, and says why. It does not show the last number we saw. A wait time from forty minutes ago is not a wait time, and a traveler acting on it makes a worse decision than a traveler who knows the figure is missing.

The same applies when a reading is simply old. Every figure carries the operator's own timestamp, and anything past a set age gets suppressed rather than displayed. One airport we read has published checkpoint figures days out of date while still marked open, so that page holds a stricter limit than the rest.

Who checks this, and how often?

Lawrence Hitches checks it, and every entry above carries the date it was last verified. Sources move. An operator redesigns a page, a feed changes shape, a figure quietly stops updating. The page then falls back to saying nothing rather than guessing.

Found something wrong? Tell us and we correct it, and say on the page that we did.