

FlightCaster (YC S09) on AWS Blog - delano
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/08/flightcaster-awspowered-flight-delay-prediction.html

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jaf12duke
A few stats on delays might be helpful...

25% of all flights are delayed. If you're on the last flight of the day--you
have a 36% chance of delay.

That's 400,000 people per day in the U.S. alone that are delayed without much
or any advanced notification. 75% of all significant delays (those over an
hour) are first posted by the airlines within 30 minutes of departure.

For those that don't want to risk missing a meeting or getting home for
dinner, advanced notification means you can change flights or at least warn
your family and colleagues.

Stay tuned--we'll soon be posting all our accuracy metrics at
<http://blog.flightcaster.com>.

For now, read more about how delays occur and why airlines report them so late
at <http://flightcaster.com/faq>

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maxklein
I don't get FlightCaster and I don't see how it can make enough money to
justify external investment. It is not very useful to me to have a "maybe"
about my flight - I will still go the airport on time and wait for the flight.

And furthermore, flights nowadays in my part of the world are on time. I've
not been delayed in quite a long while.

FlightCaster has to be more than 95% accurate all the time, or its not useful.
And I don't believe this tool is 95% accurate.

~~~
pg
For heavy business travelers, the question is not whether to go to the airport
or not, but whether to rebook or not, and they decide that based on
probabilities.

~~~
sayrer
I travel quite a lot. I don't think flightcaster would be much help for
domestic itineraries, from JFK to SFO, for example.

It doesn't deliver much value for the work week frequent flyer (those who
travel for 5 work days). Critical stuff happens on Tues/Wed/Thurs for just
this reason. It's no big deal if I get in late on Monday--I just sit in the
lounge and hack or answer email.

~~~
bbgm
When you have families every hour counts. It does matter if I get in late on
Monday, even though I am perfectly find hacking away in the lounge

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ababa
If you know your flight has a certain probability of being late, are you going
to risk arriving late at the airport and missing the plane if and when
FlightCaster gets it wrong?

Another inherent problem is related to the fact that until the airline admits
that the flight is going to be late (and sometimes even after that point) they
still require you to check in on-time or risk losing your seat and pay extra
for rescheduling. Then, what good is the information?

As customers of the airline industry we have been trained to adjust our
behavior and expectations regarding timing without being able to influence the
industry. The service will NOT and cannnot change it.

Given the factors involved, it is unlikely that the model used is able to
explain substantial amount of the variance. Hence, the ability to predict low
probabilities.

Sorry, I will not invest a penny in a company like this.

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jrockway
_The transitions I made from FORTRAN to PL/I to C to C++ to Java to Perl to
PHP were each pretty painless_

How do you go from Perl to PHP without pain? You lose pretty much every good
language feature in the process, and significantly reduce the number of tools
and libraries you have access to. This remark blows my mind.

~~~
jeffbarr
What I meant was that much of what I learned with language N was applicable to
language N+1.

Some of these new programming models don't seem as if they build on concepts
that are familiar to me.

Maybe I'm overstating this, but I get the sense that we are approaching some
sort of discontinuity where the developers who can take these new, non-
procedural, declarative, loosely typed, implicitly parallel systems and make
them dance and sing will be light years ahead of the last generation and their
pithy procedural languages.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Is pithy really the word you mean to use?

~~~
jeffbarr
Not sure, but I've been up for 20 hours and can't think of anything more to
say. Goodnight!

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ababa
To support the problem identified earlier: "75% of all significant delays
(those over an hour) are first posted by the airlines within 30 minutes of
departure." Yet, in most cases you have to check in at least an hour before
departure. So, this statics actually works against your service.

~~~
jaf12duke
The point here is that we tell you 6 hours before departure--long before the
airline posts anything and long before you check-in.

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AlexTheFounder
The stats FlightCaster collects is like the stats on road accidents: if you go
by route A on Ford you have a 90% probability to broke the car (and be late),
so you better switch the route or the car.

How many will do that?

