On 8 September 2026, an air traffic control problem brought widespread disruption to UK airports, with flights grounded and departures delayed. By that evening, ITV News was reporting more than 1,000 cancellations across the UK, citing figures from Flightradar24. Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester and Birmingham were among the airports affected.
The effects reached Dublin too. The Irish Times reported delays to flights arriving at and departing from Dublin Airport, with airport operator daa advising passengers to contact their airline for the latest information.
That was the reason I started building the Ryanair Departure Tracker.
My main interest was what was happening to flights leaving Dublin. I wanted a page I could keep open and glance at: something that would show which Ryanair flights were scheduled, boarding, delayed or already departed, with the relevant details close at hand.
News reports are useful for understanding the wider disruption. Once you are looking at a particular flight, the questions become much more specific. Has its estimated departure time changed? Is it boarding? Has a gate been assigned? I wanted those answers together in a clear departure board.
The dashboard starts with a quick overview of the selected day, including the number of scheduled flights, flights boarding, confirmed departures and delays. Below that, the departure list shows flight numbers, destinations, scheduled and estimated times, terminal and gate information, and the latest reported status.
I added search so you can find a flight by its number, destination or gate. Filters let you narrow the board to upcoming flights, departures that have already left, or a particular status. You can also save flights in your browser, which makes it easier to return to the ones you are following.
Dates needed to be straightforward too. The tracker offers yesterday, today and tomorrow, subject to the information available from the airport. Everything uses Dublin local time, including the clock on the page.
I built the first version as a small standalone application using PHP, JavaScript and CSS. The aim was to keep it lightweight, easy to maintain and free to use. I used the public departure information behind Dublin Airport’s own board, then presented the Ryanair flights in a more focused view.
Updates refresh automatically every minute while you are viewing the page. Visitors share the same recently fetched information, which helps keep repeated requests down. There is no account to create or paid flight-data subscription required to use the dashboard.
Once the standalone version was working, I adapted it into a WordPress plugin so I could add it directly to getButterfly as a page. I also matched the colours to the rest of the site: charcoal backgrounds, light text and orange highlights. The layout adapts to smaller screens, while boarding, delayed and cancelled flights retain distinct status colours.
One detail I cared about was making the age of the information visible. During disruption, an old update can easily be mistaken for a current one. The dashboard shows when the source was updated and clearly labels stale or incomplete information if fresh updates are unavailable.
Each flight also includes a route illustration showing the origin and destination, alongside a link to look up the flight on Flightradar24.
The tracker is an independent project, and the airline’s updates and airport screens remain the information to follow when travelling. My aim is to make it easier to keep an eye on departures and notice changes.
The disruption on 8 September gave me a practical reason to build something I had a use for immediately. If you are following Ryanair flights out of Dublin, you can open the departure tracker here and bookmark it for your next journey.
