Nate Silver: Fight flight delays with data

Nate Silver, the data guru who attracted national attention for his on-target forecasts during the past two presidential elections, is taking on another challenge: predicting on-time flights.

Silver has introduced an airline-focused feature on his FiveThirtyEight website. He and his team have crunched reams of federal data on flight times to produce an interactive tool that will help fliers figure out which airlines will get them to their destinations in the timeliest manner.

Silver says such a tool is necessary because flight delays have a severe negative impact on the economy.

There is data to support that. A Global Business Travel Association study late last year found that air travel mishaps — which include delayed and canceled flights — took nearly 11 hours to resolve and $1,154 in missed work and out-of-pocket expenses.

For the 15.3 million flights studied by Carlson Wagonlit Travel in 2013, the financial impact of delays was $245 million in lost work time.

Then there's the psychological impact. In a CWT survey of more than 6,000 travelers, delays ranked fourth in terms of stress intensity.

"Better ways to avoid (flight delays) would be something good," Silver says. "To be able to claw even a few minutes of that back seems like it's valuable to me."

The Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports on-time arrival flight statistics every month. The department defines "on-time" as arriving within 15 minutes of its scheduled time.

Silver says his tool draws on data from the Transportation Department but will avoid using the traditional metric of the 15-minute on-time window. Instead, the feature will evaluate "target flight time" – or how long a flight should take on any given route "if the only things that mattered are how far you fly and which direction," Silver says.

That will be crunched against data that show how flights actually perform on a route.

"Fundamentally, you fly in one direction at 500-and-some miles per hour, and it shouldn't be that complicated," Silver says. "But of course, it is."

Rich Stedronsky, a general manager at a weather radar and manufacturing company from Georgetown, Texas, understands how complicated it is.

He says he experiences flight delays about 15% of the time he travels. A 16-hour delay due to maintenance issues caused him to miss a wedding he was scheduled to be a groomsman in. A nine-hour delay cost him a job interview.

"Flight delays have made me miss more meetings and events than I would like to remember," he says.

Silver says the new tool will help travelers such as Stedronsky figure out which airlines — or even which airports — offer flights that come close to what would be expected in ideal conditions.

"When there's a gap, how much of that do we apportion to the particular airlines vs. to the airports?" Silver says, noting some airports suffer from "air traffic, weather conditions and approach patterns that make it hard for any airline to do well."

As an example, Silver points to trips between New York and Chicago O'Hare, which he calls "just about the worst route you can fly in the country."

Both airports are often plagued with significant delays. That particularly impacts American and United because both airlines have large hubs out of O'Hare.

"The airlines aren't necessarily running that far behind their (published) schedules on that route, but they're padding their schedules by 40 minutes to account for all the delays to begin with," he says.

The new tool will help travelers compare how different airlines perform on the same route. Sometimes, the difference is extreme.

Take flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The best-performing carrier, Virgin America, gets in 30 minutes earlier than Southwest, Silver says.

The interactive graphic will have a dedicated spot on FiveThirtyEight, which is part of the ESPN media family. It will be updated monthly.

Wyndy Pappargeris, a corporate travel manager at Eliassen Group, a technology staffing services and consulting company in Wakefield, Mass., welcomes any tool that will help her employees get to their destinations faster.

She encourages them to use a mobile app that provides information about delays, cancellations, weather at the destination and more. If bad weather looms, they can alter their travel plans. Getting as much information as soon as possible is key, she says.

"They can make better decisions ahead of time," she says.

Although Silver's data genius has served him well in politics and other areas, some doubt his latest project will work as well with the complex aviation industry.

"I honestly don't think there's much new information to it," says Alan Bender, professor of aeronautics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "Airlines and airports are already intimately familiar with the genesis of their delays. They live and breathe this stuff every day."

He applauded Silver's FiveThirtyEight tool for packaging the BTS's data "into a somewhat more user friendly form," but ultimately wonders if it's "nothing more than a novel spin on old news."

For at least some fliers, any new voice may be welcome news in the battle to find the quickest flights.