Google Flights Will Now Predict Airline Delays -- Before the Airlines Do (techcrunch.com)

Google is rolling out a few new features to its Google Flights search engine to help travelers tackle some of the more frustrating aspects of air travel -- delays and the complexities of the cheaper, Basic Economy fares. From a report: With the regard to delays, Google Flights won't just be pulling in information from the airlines directly, however -- it will take advantage of its understanding of historical data and its machine learning algorithms to predict delays that haven't yet been flagged by airlines themselves. Explains Google, the combination of data and A.I. technologies means it can predict some delays in advance of any sort of official confirmation. Google says that it won't actually flag these in the app until it's at least 80 percent confident in the prediction, though.

Comments

This isn't new

[the_skywise]

Some of the airline reservation services display an "ontime" percentage next to the flight - EG This flight is ontime 75% of the time.
You don't need machine learning for something that simple statistical analysis will do.
Unless Google's adding in a few factors into the model like weather and time of year.

Which leads to an interesting side-business. Gambling on "airline times."
Ahh the airfield is kinda muddy today and Frontier airlines always does better on a muddy track...

Probably not that hard to do better

[Nkwe]

I fly on United regularly and one of my frustrations is that the airline is slow to update the status of flights that they should know are going to be late. Using their own smartphone app (or website) you can see the status of a given flight and can also easily navigate to the previous flight leg for where your plane is coming from. I have observed that it is very common for my flight to be listed as "on time" when the the app shows that the plane I am scheduled to be on is going to be late in arriving to the airport (making it physically impossible for my flight to be on time.) I get that the schedules have quite a bit of padding and that a short delay in an inbound flight doesn't necessarily mean that the outbound flight will end up be late in its ultimate destination, but when the airline knows that the inbound flight is going to be an hour late, it's shouldn't take half an hour for it to update the status of all the cascading delays. Perhaps Google can be more aggressive at prediction or maybe at least create some prediction competition so that United gets more timely with its updates.

Planes are pretty full these days and knowing 15 minutes earlier that you are going to miss a connection can easily make the difference as to if you can make other arrangements or not.

Re:Probably not that hard to do better

[aaarrrgggh]

United (at least) only establishes a delay reactively, and is hesitant to do so until they have a specific reason to do so. You have to start to learn what those reasons are if you want to anticipate real departure times. Aircraft substitutions not related to an inbound flight delay are the hardest one to see as a passenger... but if you see that the inbound flight is anticipated to land 15 minutes after your scheduled departure, you can be pretty sure your flight will not be leaving before 45 minutes after scheduled.

Knowing that a crew member is sick at an outstation, or that earlier delays will force your crew to time out before the flight is much harder to do.

Machine Learning can do a lot better

[Roger W Moore]

Some of the airline reservation services display an "ontime" percentage next to the flight - EG This flight is ontime 75% of the time. You don't need machine learning for something that simple statistical analysis will do.

You do if you want to provide better information than this. For example, I would be fine taking a flight which is 75% on time and the remaining 25% of the time is only 20 minutes late. I would be less happy if 25% of the time the flight was 2 hours late. Also this statistic ignores patterns in the delays. For example, suppose the flight is on time 90% of the time from Mon-Thu but delayed by 2 hours 85% of the time on Friday? This would be completely consistent with the data provided if you average over the week but clearly, you would never want to take this flight on Friday!

While you might be able to do a simple analysis on a weekly pattern airline schedules are more complex and if the delay is caused by a complex interaction of the crew, plane and airport schedules it will be a lot harder to pick up manually whereas a machine learning algorithm should easily be able to cope with this level of complexity and spot that on the third tuesday and second wednesday of every month your flight is delayed. In fact, if the airlines do not do this already, this might be a useful tool for them to spot and identify problems so they can fix them.

Re: Before the Airlines Do?

[bobbied]

Largely true, but let's remember that the people giving you information about your late flight are as in the dark as you are.

I'm sure dispatch knows what's happening airline wide and how it's likely to affect the future schedule, but until it's been fully decided how to deal with the schedule impacts they don't start telling everybody because they are not totally sure.

Reasons not to communicate include the following: 1. Passengers may take other options. 2. They may be wrong about how long the delay will be, if they estimate too much delay, passengers get shuffled or are missing when they eventually try to board, if they estimate to little delay, passengers may be more angry than necessary with having to wait longer. 3. It's a lose/lose situation when you announce a delay.

Re:Google can predict the future now.

[nitehawk214]

Sell advertising.

Re: Seems easy....

[nitehawk214]

You are not too far off there. PIT is starting to allow non-fliers to the airside terminal to access the mall parts. The long term goal is to remove the landside terminal entirely and use the unused half of the airside terminal as more mall space.

http://www.pittsburghmagazine....
http://www.flypittsburgh.com/m...

I have no clue why someone would want to go through TSA security just to go to... a mall?

Re:Seems easy....

[dgatwood]

I don't understand why DFW would be a problem ...

During certain times of year, winds shift in such a way that they go from using the five parallel north-south runways (four primary, plus one shorter runway for small planes) to using the two 45-degree runways.

When this happens, they have to stop all departures and all arrivals that aren't already lined up, and once the inbound traffic is cleared, then and only then can they resume takeoffs and landings on the new runways. IIRC, the changeover itself creates about a twenty or thirty minute hiccup every time they switch runways.

But to make matters worse, at that point, there are less than half as many active runways, which reduces the maximum traffic volume proportionately. So if it stays in that configuration during high-volume periods, delays can pile up, and in some cases, they may end up diverting some arrivals to Love Field.