Google Flights now predicts airline delays before the airlines do?

Real World Aviation
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Hello and welcome to the Official Thread of Simple Aviation:

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  • Simple Aviation is a topic of me, putting everyday facts, and turning them into simpler facts for you to understand. I take everyday wiki facts that some people can’t understand and I turn them into simpler form. This is not subjected to copyright however I kindly ask that you don’t use this title.

Our Story Coverage Today: Hello aviation enthusiasts, and welcome to the thread. On today’s story, we have something quite interesting. Google Flights will be now operated by the company Google in a really unique way! The website is to provide travellers with new and incoming delays of nearby aircrafts, and calculates the rest :). “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.” says an article (will be down below). The website is also going to predict incoming weather, late arrivals and incoming ETE.

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Here is a clear example! The website shows us the flight, departure and arrival time! etc.

Purpose of the site: To now better inform travellers if their flight will be delayed (easyJet), cancelled (RyanAir), or on time (I dont know what to put here). The site gives great feedback from anywhere in the world and offers some great feedback. Next time you fly, might want to check the site for your flight :).“You can track the status of your flight by searching for your flight number or the airline and flight route, notes Google. The delay information will then appear in the search results.”, which means your never going to go blind or expect the aircraft to come at any time (Southwest).

REAL LIFE EXAMPLE:
https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/googletravel_flightsbasiceconomy_1024x1024.gif?w=680&h=680

  • Here we can different flights to different places, get the best deals, and book it easily! Google says that its AI are very up to date on current events and certain things. Here is a positive, “Since you can’t take action on the alerts until the airline makes an official announcement, they will largely just cause more anxiety on top of your already stressful travel experience.”

My response: I believe that this A.I is helpful however, I am concerned about the safety and information going out. Even A.I’s make mistakes. I am not 100% positive as well that their specific algorithm. Websites like flightradar24, foreflight, etc, are more in depth helpful to many passengers as they provide more information, but a good sense to know where the aircraft is and if it will be delayed or not is quite useful.

  • In conclusion: This is a type of website that would have to partner with other aviation websites (flightradar24) to get more accurate updated information about the flight your about to take. The website is used for checking flights, booking flights, and keeping updated on flights. Thats all today , thank you guys for taking the time to read through the article and make sure to check this out for yourself, signing out, my name is Ryan, this is Simple Aviation, have a great week

Sources:

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Very, very nice and informative topic! Google is a very cool company and has a lot of small, but useful features.

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I am sure this can easily be done by researching the aircraft’s on time-performance and the average on time-performances of the airline on the route. Quite cool to see though!

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This would be really useful information to help plan your day. :)

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Fantastic! I’ve used Google Flights to book all my flights. Very reliable and trustworthy, always finds the best deals direct from the airline.

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Google will tell you that when you are looking at flights on
Google.com/flights
If the flight you try to book is often delayed it should say in red: Often delayed by 30+ minutes.

It’s right too, I booked KORD-KLAX-NZAA, when I booked google told me the United flight to LA is often delayed. We got on board, were ready to push, the engine wouldn’t start. We were delayed over an hour.

KLAX-NZAA on ANZ was also delayed. We waited at the gate for over an hour before they opened boarding.

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lol - engines wouldn’t start

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I kid you not.
We began push and I heard the engine start to spool up then a clunking sound came on and the engine turned off. They towed us back into the gate and we deplaned and got on the 757 at the gate over.

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I doubt that happened everyday lol
“Delayed 30+ mins due to that plane never starting its engines”

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United only flies 757-300s on that flight. Those planes are pretty old and are flown like workhorses, even if the engines work 95% of the time, other stupid maintacne issues probably happen on the regular.

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It’s not a bad idea, but it would not be good in hubs when operations management for airlines can change aircraft assignments on a moment’s notice if they have the resources for it. For example, Air Canada rotates some 777 through Vancouver on a regular basis for A-checks, if they’re behind on the timeline on the A-check, they may move a couple of 777s around to minimize operational impact. There is no way Google can predict that when AC’s operations team doesn’t know they’ll be moving things around until a couple of hours before departure.

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I think I would prefer FlightAware over this just because of familiarity and more avgeek info in it, but that prediction feature is very handy! I’ll try this out when I fly to SLC and possibly compare the two.

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