A new website called Delaycast has just gone into beta. As the name suggests, it’s a website that forecasts flight delays so that you can optimize your travel time.
Run by analytical professionals with a strong base in statistics, they run historical flight performance details into advance predictive mathematical models to understand flight delay patterns. Like this they predict future flight patterns basis the airport you are flying from and the time of your flight.
So (as I understand) Delaycast will give you the odds of your flight being on time or getting delayed, calculated from historical data. These odds are useful when booking because you can keep in mind the chances of you being delayed, missing connections, and the possibility of unintended stay-overs. Sounds like they use some math version of Probability(?)
The estimates are based on historical data and you can only search delays basis airports (not flights). They project 4-5 months in the future, and of course, since they are estimates, there are chances that their predictions don’t hold through. To add to that, understandably, they do not take into account “in the moment” delays that could happen while you are flying: weather delays, or technical difficulties that might occur on the day.
In my mind, the main causes of flight delays are: 1) weather 2) technical difficulties in air 3) late take-off due to technical difficulties 4) not being able to land because of issues at destination airport 5) reputation of airline. Other than the reputation of the airline, none of these factors are taken into consideration at Delaycast.
So, all in all, it’s surely a novel concept that provides a service if you take it into account when booking flights. However, everything can change on the actual day of the flight, so how useful is it really?