Google Says It Can Predict When Your Flight Is Going to Be Late Apparently even better than the airports can.
By Nina Zipkin
It seems that there is no consensus about how much longer we'll be stuck with winter. Punxsutawney Phil did see his shadow -- ostensibly predicting six more weeks of winter -- while the less alliteratively named Staten Island Chuck did not.
Now, predictions are a tricky business, but it seems that we're going to continue to deal with precipitation and chilly temperatures at least for the time being, and that means travel delays, especially for flights.
Google might be a little bit more adept at attempting to see the future than a groundhog. The search giant said that an update of its Google Flights app is making it possible to predict whether your flight will be delayed, even before the airlines figure it out.
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"Flights already shows delays, and now we're sharing reasons for those delays and delay predictions too," the company explained in a blog post. "Using historic flight status data, our machine learning algorithms can predict some delays even when this information isn't available from airlines yet -- and delays are only flagged when we're at least 80 percent confident in the prediction."
The company doesn't suggest relying solely on Google Flights to decide whether you should go to the airport or not as things can always change, but at least you'll have a sense of how long you're going to potentially be stuck in the terminal.
