Dan Moren, SixColors:

Here’s a little experiment for you. Bring up the search field on your iPhone and type in a flight number—for example, WW126. Near the top of the results will be an option to bring up flight status. Tap that and you’ll get a nice little map of the flight as well some other info, like destination, duration, and so on.

Now, try asking Siri for the status of the same flight. I’ll wait.

Right. You’ll notice that Siri doesn’t seem to know anything about flight status, and instead goes straight to a web search.

There are two sides to this coin. On the one side, it’s infuriating when something that should clearly work a certain way refuses to work that way. You can see that your iPhone “knows” about flight status, and it seems obvious that Siri should, at the very least, be able to pass through a request to the underlying interface.

On the other side, I’m betting that the reason Siri is unable to do something that seems, on the surface, such a simple task, is missing wiring. Siri remains a constantly evolving work-in-progress. And, it seems, at least on the surface, that the team that enabled the Springboard search feature is not in the same planning groove as the Siri team.

iOS is a complex beast. Siri is a complex beast. The question to me: Is there a designer at the top building a model that feeds both of these teams? Or is it more likely that the flight status search feature was born inside the Springboard search team, never rising high enough in the planning process in a way that fed the Siri team.

I don’t think Siri not being nimble with flight status is a big deal. But I do think it might be a sign of a larger issue.