Technologies

Stay Informed About Your Flights This Holiday Season With Your iPhone’s Tracker

Your iPhone is hiding a flight tracker. Here’s how it works.

Thanksgiving is only a few short weeks away and if you plan on flying during the holiday season, keeping up-to-date on changes to your flights is crucial. Airports can be hectic during any holiday, but with the government shutdown continuing, flights are liable to change or be cancelled more often.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to get up-to-date information about your flight. For starters, your airline probably has an app, and if not, you can check its website. If you’re in a hurry, you can Google the flight number. Or you can just use your iPhone’s built-in flight tracker that’s sneakily tucked away.

That’s right: Your iPhone has a flight tracker that you may have never known about. It’s there for when it’s needed. Below, we’ll show you have to access it in not one, but two places, so you never have to go hunting for your flight info elsewhere again.

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For more on the iPhone, check out everything Apple announced at WWDC 2025.

How to track your flight via iMessage

Before we start, there are a few prerequisites you must meet:

Make sure iMessage is enabled (it doesn’t work with SMS/MMS).
You’ll need your flight number somewhere in your text messages, whether you’ve sent that information to someone (even yourself) or it’s been sent to you.
The flight number must be sent in this format: [Airline] [Flight number], for example, American Airlines 9707.

Launch the native Messages app on your iPhone and open the text message thread that contains your flight information. You’ll know the flight tracker feature works when the text with the flight information appears underlined, which means it’s actionable and you can tap on it.

If your flight is still several months away or it’s already passed, you might see a message that says, «Flight information unavailable.» You might also see another flight that’s not yours because airlines recycle flight numbers.

You can check your flight status from Spotlight Search, too

If getting your flight information from Messages wasn’t easy enough, you can also grab the details right from your iPhone’s home screen by swiping down and adding your flight number into Spotlight Search. Even better, this works with Spotlight Search on your Mac computer, too.

How to access the hidden flight tracker

Although the airline name/flight number format highlighted above is the best way to go, there are other texting options that will lead you to the same result. So let’s say we stick with American Airlines 9707, other options that may bring up the flight tracker include:

AmericanAirlines9707 (no spaces)
AmericanAirlines 9707 (only one space)
AA9707 (airline name is abbreviated and no space)
AA 9707 (abbreviated and space)

I would suggest you keep the airline name spelled out completely and add a space between the two pieces of information — like in the previous section — because for some airlines, these alternative options may not work.

Real-time flight tracking

Once everything is set, tap on the flight information in your text messages. If the feature works correctly, you should see the following two options appear in a quick-action menu:

Preview Flight: View the flight’s details. Tap this to view more information about the flight.
Copy Flight Code: Copy the flight code to your clipboard (in case you want to send your flight details to someone else via text or email).

If you select Preview Flight, at the top of the window, you’ll see the best part of this feature: a real-time flight tracker map. A line will connect the two destinations, and a tiny airplane will move between them, indicating where the flight is at that exact moment.

Underneath the map, you’ll see important flight information:

Airline name and flight number
Flight status (arriving on time, delayed, canceled, etc.)
Terminal and gate numbers (for arrival and departure)
Arrival and departure time
Flight duration
Baggage claim (the number of the baggage carousel)

If you swipe left on the bottom half of the flight tracker, you can switch between flights, but only if there’s a return flight.

For more travel tips, don’t miss our test on whether AI can help you fly more sustainably.

Technologies

Google, Meta and Amazon Join Global Pact to Fight Rising Online Scams

The companies will share fraud intelligence and coordinate responses as AI makes scams faster, cheaper and harder to detect.

Modern online scams operate across multiple platforms, perhaps spanning social media, messaging apps, email and online marketplaces. Google, Meta and Amazon are among 11 tech, retail and payments companies that have signed a new agreement to combat online scams by sharing threat intelligence across platforms, Axios first reported Monday.

The initiative, called the Industry Accord Against Online Scams & Fraud, is designed to improve how companies detect and respond to fraud that spans multiple services. Participants say they will exchange signals, such as scam-linked accounts and fraudulent domains, and coordinate enforcement actions.

By sharing intelligence in near real time, companies hope to identify these scams earlier and stop them before they spread.

The effort reflects how modern scams operate. A victim might encounter a fake celebrity investment ad on social media, move to a messaging app where the scammer builds trust, then faces prompts to send money through a fraudulent website, payment app or crypto wallet — spanning multiple companies’ ecosystems.

Google said it now blocks hundreds of millions of scam-related results every day using AI, underscoring how both attackers and defenders are increasingly relying on the same technology. Meta removed more than 159 million scam ads in 2025 and is expanding AI tools to detect impersonation and warn users.

Online scams are growing rapidly, in part because generative AI has lowered the barrier to entry. AI can be used not only to produce realistic phishing emails but also to clone voices and deepfake videos that impersonate executives, public figures and even family members.

The agreement is voluntary and doesn’t create new legal obligations, but it comes after regulators’ increased pressure on tech platforms to address fraud more aggressively. The companies say they will begin building frameworks for reporting and intelligence-sharing, though it’s not yet clear how quickly those systems will be deployed or how effective they will be in practice.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Wednesday, March 18

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for March 18.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? I thought it was a fairly easy one, but read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Word before «card,» flood» or «photography»
Answer: FLASH

6A clue: Joust weapon
Answer: LANCE

7A clue: Brain, heart or lungs
Answer: ORGAN

8A clue: «Frozen» reindeer
Answer: SVEN

9A clue: What can be found on frozen roads or frozen margaritas
Answer: SALT

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Follow a dentist’s recommendation
Answer: FLOSS

2D clue: Baby bug
Answer: LARVA

3D clue: Shape made in the snow
Answer: ANGEL

4D clue: Very little
Answer: SCANT

5D clue: Egg layer
Answer: HEN

Technologies

Amazon Speeds Up Delivery Even More With 1- and 3-Hour Options

The retailer says the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities, with discounted shipping for Prime members.

Same-day delivery apparently isn’t fast enough for some Amazon shoppers. The retail giant said on Tuesday it’s adding new shipping options that will get products to front doors within a one- or three-hour window.

The company said in its announcement that the one-hour option is available in hundreds of cities across the US, while the three-hour option is now live in more than 2,000 areas. Amazon’s web page at amazon.com/getitfast shows whether those options are available to shoppers for their location. More than 90,000 products will be available for those shipping windows, the company said.

For those who can’t get those services (including the author of this post, who lives between Austin and San Antonio in Texas), a message will display: «3-hour delivery is currently unavailable. Check back at a later time or shop products with Same-Day delivery below.»

Pricing for the faster delivery options is not cheap: It’ll cost you $20 for one-hour delivery and $15 for three-hour delivery for those without an Amazon Prime account, or $10 and $5 for customers who subscribe to Prime.

Last year, the company rolled out faster Amazon delivery options to 4,000 additional areas.

In a video of the podcast Learn and Be Curious with Doug Herrington, hosted by Amazon’s CEO of worldwide stores, Kandace Kapps, the director of the company’s same-day strategy team, spoke in more detail about the challenges of fast shipping. Kapps discussed shifts in customer buying habits over the last few years, such as more people buying household essentials like toilet paper on Amazon.

She said that Amazon can deliver so quickly by placing same-day delivery hubs close to customers in metro areas and by getting products ready to ship within 15 minutes, aided by warehouse robots.

«I think customers are going to continue to get magically surprised by how fast we can deliver to their doorstop,» Kapps said.

Herrington said fast shipping increases sales: «When we speed up the service, the probability that somebody buys a product from us goes up.»

Other retailers, including Walmart, have been adding same-day delivery options or exploring other ways to speed up shipping times to compete with Amazon.

Removing buyers’ moments of hesitation

Part of Amazon’s strategy, which has involved a massive buildout of locations, deployment of thousands of trucks, deals with other delivery services and investment in logistics software, is actually pretty simple: being there when people need last-minute items or make impulse buys.

«It’s about removing the last moment where you would’ve reconsidered the purchase,» said Stephanie Carls, retail insights expert at coupon and promotional-code website RetailMeNot, a sibling site of CNET. «It changes how you shop, not just how fast you get things.»

Carls said that Amazon’s super-fast delivery is removing the timeframe when people might change their minds about a purchase.

«There used to be a gap between deciding to buy something and actually having it. That’s when you’d price check, rethink it, or decide you didn’t need it after all,» she said. «This closes that gap.»

The retail expert said that competitors, including Walmart and Target, have been speeding up delivery times in some markets. Still, they’re not matching Amazon’s scale or product range at those speeds or levels of consistency.

«And that’s what starts to make everyone else feel slow,» Carls said. «Amazon’s advantage is how tightly connected its technology, inventory and delivery networks are, which makes this level of speed more repeatable.»