Early coverage: 8 Canadian airports, 25 Oct 2026 only.
What’s coveredNear you
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Explore cases by airport and date.
Find a flight
Check one flight, or every departure from an airport on a day.
Don’t know the flight number? See cases near you or browse by airport and date.
Coverage and limitations
The airports and dates we have, and the limits of these counts.
About Swapped
In short
Swapped follows the aircraft listed on a cancelled flight, by its registration (such as C-GEJL), and checks whether the records list that aircraft on another flight from the same airport around the same time.
When they do, the case is labelled “Same aircraft listed on two flight records”. You can check it against the records shown. It doesn’t prove the aircraft was moved to the other flight.
Swapped can’t tell you why a flight was cancelled, how the airline classifies the cancellation, or whether you’re owed compensation.
We cover a small set of Canadian airports and dates. See coverage and limitations.
One example
AC 1014, Toronto to Fort Myers, 25 Oct 2026. Times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT, UTC−4).
- 11:41 EDT Aircraft C-GEJL lands in Toronto from Cancún as AC 1811.
- 14:10 EDT AC 1014 is due to leave with C-GEJL listed. It is cancelled.
- 14:32 EDT The records list C-GEJL departing Toronto for Fort Myers as AC 1664.
The records show the same route under another flight number. They don’t establish whether this was a combined service or one movement listed under two numbers. Both records share one callsign, so the case is marked uncertain, and when C-GEJL was assigned to AC 1014 isn’t known.
When we list a case
We only consider flights the source lists as cancelled (not “possibly cancelled”) that have an aircraft registration on the record. Then all of these have to hold:
- The aircraft was at the departure airport when the flight was due to leave. Either its previous flight had landed there by then (15 minutes’ grace), or it had been there since its first flight of the day.
- The records show the same aircraft taking off from that airport on a different flight number. A scheduled or unknown status isn’t enough.
- It took off between an hour before the cancelled flight’s scheduled departure and an hour after its scheduled arrival.
- That other flight was scheduled no more than an hour before the cancelled one, so an earlier flight running late doesn’t count.
A flight inside that window isn’t proof that the cancelled flight lost its aircraft to it.
How each case is checked
Every case answers these questions, with the records shown:
- Was the aircraft at the origin, and what was its previous movement?
- Is the other flight recorded as departed, and how (runway time, revised time or status only)?
- Was the aircraft recorded on the cancelled flight before the cancellation?
- Do the times allow one aircraft to fly both, if they were separate flights? This tests timing only.
- Are there gaps or conflicts in the records?
- Was the other flight a separate scheduled flight, or something the data can’t pin down, such as a diversion, an air return, a positioning flight or the same movement under a second number?
A flight sold under two airline codes is one movement, and we count it once. An air return or a flight with no schedule is never used as the other flight. When the data can’t tell the situations apart, the case says so and is marked uncertain.
Each case also says how well the aircraft assignment is supported:
- Pre-cancellation assignment confirmed
- We saw the aircraft on the flight in a snapshot taken before departure and before any cancellation.
- Assignment timing unknown
- The aircraft is on the record, but we only looked afterwards. Every case so far is at this level.
- Inferred aircraft
- The record had no aircraft, and we worked it out from other data.
What it can’t tell you
An aircraft flying elsewhere can happen for many reasons: a crew shortage, a maintenance or safety decision, a storm elsewhere in the network, or two flights being combined. From the outside these can look the same.
Under Canada’s Air Passenger Protection Regulations, what an airline owes depends on how the cancellation is classified: within the airline’s control, within its control but required for safety, or outside its control. The airline decides the category and has to tell passengers the reason. The Canadian Transportation Agency handles disputes. Swapped doesn’t classify cancellations.
Weather, airport notices and safety reports appear on a case as context. Each says whether it matches this aircraft or only the airport and day. A quiet weather report doesn’t rule weather out.
Swapped shows flight data only and isn’t legal advice.
Data sources, updates and gaps
Flight status and aircraft registrations come from AeroDataBox (airport departure boards and each aircraft’s flight list). We collect a day after it’s over, so the data shows how things ended, not when they changed.
Coverage is limited to the airports and dates on the coverage page. A flight that isn’t there may still have been cancelled, and a cancellation with no aircraft on its record can’t be checked at all.
Context comes from METAR weather reports (Iowa Environmental Mesonet and aviationweather.gov), NAV CANADA airport notices from snapshots we take, Transport Canada’s CADORS safety reports (Open Government Licence – Canada) and ADS-B tracks from adsb.lol (© adsb.lol contributors, ODbL 1.0) and the OpenSky Network when available. Airport locations come from OurAirports and map outlines from Natural Earth.
Corrections
Every case has a “Report an error” link that prefills a report. Tell us what looks wrong and, if you can, where the right information is. We check it against the source records.
Reports go to swapped.reports@outlook.com.
When a case changes, its page shows a change history with the date, what changed and why. If a case no longer meets the rule, its link stays up and says when and why it was removed.