

Everyone says airlines cancel more flights in winter weather...but it's not true - jaf12duke
http://blog.flightcaster.com/everyones-talking-about-airlines-canceling-mo

======
fnid2
You know, the funny thing about flightcaster. I was in the airport and my
flight was cancelled. 2 hours later, I checked flightcaster and it said the
flight was on time!

If you can't tell when a flight really is cancelled 2 hours after the fact,
there's something wrong with the algorithm.

~~~
jaf12duke
Wow. I'm sorry to hear that. That is simply unacceptable. We pride ourselves
on great data, but we do make mistakes (bugs, data anomolies, etc).

If you decide to give us another shot, please let us know if there's ever an
issue--we'll troubleshoot it immediately. Our best feedback comes from HN
readers.

We're working on ways to help report when a prediction is off. Thanks for
using our product. If there's anything I personally can do to help, please dm
me at @flightcaster or email jason@flightcaster.com

~~~
fnid2
I thought it would be a good chance to test out the accuracy. The airline's
website had been updated, so I know the information was "out there" about the
flight status. I know you are using predictive algorithms, but you may also
try to get some kind of feed for actual flight status when possible. I know
that kind of polling is expensive, but it's probably the only way to avoid
this problem in the future.

This particular flight was canceled because something was wrong with the
plane. There were guys working on it for an hour before the flight was due to
leave.

Thanks for the response Jason. It's a good service, this may have been an
anomaly.

~~~
physcab
It seems like in this situation Flightcaster might benefit from doing some
sort of sentiment analysis on twitter and cross check that with their machine
generated recs. If any twitter data exists, they could assign a weight that
might be proportional to the number of tweets.

~~~
fnid2
The issue with that approach is largely a performance one, judging from what I
know of flightcaster. If they have to issue a search to twitter for the flight
info, the user has to wait on it.

If they constantly poll, then there are thousands of flights and they have to
poll them regularly to make sure they have the latest info on the flight.

IIRC, the current algorithms include historical ontime percentages and
weather, but I don't remember reading about them using the realtime web or
airline's websites to gather it. Of course I don't really know what I'm
talking about, it's all conjecture.

------
thingie
One would also like to ask if it's even true that everyone says this. Are
there data to support that claim? :) (Yes, it's just a joke, yet... it would
make nice irony.)

