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AI Google Transportation

Google Flights Will Now Predict Airline Delays -- Before the Airlines Do (techcrunch.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
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.
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Google Flights Will Now Predict Airline Delays -- Before the Airlines Do More

Google Flights Will Now Predict Airline Delays -- Before the Airlines Do

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  • I predict your flight will be delayed, odds are I'm right.

  • This isn't new (Score:3)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @03:12PM (#56042515)
    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...

    • Ah yes... Frontier.. "The proud bird with the muddy feet" was the sarcastic description my Dad used to give for them after they had a runway excursion into the mud at Stapleton Airport in Denver.

      • We use to call Alaska Airlines "Elastic Airlines" because their schedules were so flexible. That might be partially due to weather, though.

    • Machine Learning can do a lot better (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @03:39PM (#56042701) Journal

      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.

  • Google Flights Will Now Predict Airline Delays -- Before the Airlines Do

    Headline is misleading. Google doesn't know 'before the airlines do.'

    What Google will be doing is telling you before the airlines do.

    The airlines by and large know which flights are going to be delayed, why, and by how much. They don't need Google magic for this. They just don't always choose to tell you (or their frontline staff), because reasons.

    Google is going to tell you anyway, even if the airlines haven't.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The airlines by and large know which flights are going to be delayed, why, and by how much. They don't need Google magic for this. They just don't always choose to tell you (or their frontline staff), because reasons.

      Yeah, no shit.

      They know the plane you're flying hasn't left yet, and they know they don't have another plane for you.

      So when that 4 hour incoming flight hasn't left yet, and yours is supposed to leave in 20 minutes, the airline bloody well knows this. But they will delay and stall admitting th

      • 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 wil

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Until a series of other delays has freed up a different plane that is already at the terminal and a simple gate change allows the original flight to leave on time.

        Then your idiotic "80% correct" google algorithm has everyone off eating at a restaurant, booking hotel rooms, and/or generally unaware that there is not a 5 hour delay but instead you should be boarding right now.

      • That's when they tell you there will be a 30 minute delay. I think its part of the stringing along / breaking it gently process.
    • I can't wait until Google predicts some jackwagon breaking a overhead bin while boarding because 'ITLL FIT IT ALWAYS FITS'.
      ...that's what she said...

  • Probably not that hard to do better (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @03:21PM (#56042567)
    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.

    • Yes. I've had the same experience several times on United. One benefit is that you can get to the desk and change your booking before the crowd knows.

    • This information doesn't necessarily help as airlines often swap planes if the inbound is too late.

    • 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 aft

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pz ( 113803 )

      United (I fly a lot with them) does not share their forecasting with the customer. I can't count how many times I've been on a flight that had slowly creeping delays that, given experience, had an obvious conclusion. We have simply scads of data of airline arrival / departure times, combined with day-of-week, local and regional weather, etc., and it is unimaginable that United's central planning isn't already doing a lot of work with that data. Same goes for the other major players. If they aren't, then

      • My understanding, however, is that the delays are often released to the public in incremental fashion JUST IN CASE the delay ends up being shorter than an initial prediction.

        You are correct. I've had delays of 2hours go poof. Upline issues, ATC holds, you name it, it's gone poof a couple of times due to reroutes and such.

        plus... rampers can move quickly if motivated. We've done 10 minute turns before negating a delay...

    • UA is a mess of IT. UAX contractors (Skywest, OO, ZW) systems don't directly interface with SHARES, so delays have to be punched in. Also, inbound/outbound delays can be automated IF the gate information is correct in SHARES prior to the delay being posted. The problem is, find small podunk airports willing to 6:FM3@555GTAI1 . They don't teach you that in class anymore.
    • One of the cause that you get the warning much later is because the app is getting directly message from the scheduling & operating system, while you get your warning from the RES (or sometimes CKI) systems. The airline backend are a series of interconnected systems and the time it takes to propagate or even the resource given are not the same. Most probably you were actually not buying your ticket directly from the airline but through an agency or a third party system. In which case your booking was in
  • As in learning to come up with as many bullshit buzzwords they can fit into a sentence to describe what would otherwise be a pedestrian algorithm.

  • if (strcmp(Carrier, "AA") == 0 || strcmp(Airport, "EWR") == 0) then DisplayDelay();

  • I think most aircraft already broadcast their location via ADS-B [wikipedia.org]:

    Flight info [youtu.be].

    I don't know a lot about it but I believe people track these things for fun (& it sounds like fun too!). I would expect that they pour this info into a global database too. It would make sense for Google to tap this info and use a planes location & expected location as part of its prediction.

    Actually, I think there's a scheme (possibly active) out to have LEO satellites tracking this info to mitigate the "lost aircraft" e

    • ADSB antennas points to the ground and I'm not sure how well 1090Khz AM modulation would be heard in space..

    • Dang... there was supposed to be a question-mark at the end of my title... as in...

      "Taps into ADS-B & open tracking of flight info?"

      I don't know if Googles system actually does use ADS-B and was just pondering rather than stating (which it looks like without the "?")

  • I do find that airlines seem to like to keep announcements about delays quiet until the last minute. Certainly in the UK they are rarely displayed before checkin (only after security, when you can't go back), which of course keeps you stuck in the airport where I suspect they hope you'll spend money in the shops during your delay. I find it can be useful to search for your flight on Flightradar or the like. They often have the registration of the aircraft booked to operate the flight (how they get this, I

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