Airlines are not good at a lot of things. They’re not great at treating customers well, pricing things fairly, offering much legroom, or getting to their destination on time. The one thing airlines should be good at is knowing when their flights will be delayed — and now they’re not even the best at doing that!
Google recently updated its Flights app, which crunches numbers on plane fares and helps you plan trips, and says that the service can now tell when a flight is going to be delayed, before the airline officially confirms it. The company told TechCrunch that thanks to a combination of historical data and “machine learning algorithms” (whatever), Google can predict when you’re going to be angry and drunk in an airport bar, later falling asleep upright in a chair.
Google won’t flag a probable delay unless it’s 80 percent sure, so you might want to get to the airport anyway in case it’s a false flag, but at least when the official announcement comes, you won’t get caught completely off guard.
