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Comment by unishark | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing you don't have this woman's inside knowledge of the airline system in China. You're assuming here that a person can't reasonably know or deduce a flight will be delayed, but her track record says different.

Sometimes, often in fact, it becomes pretty obvious a flight will be delayed but they just haven't bothered to officially announce the fact yet. Such as if the plane isn't even there because they are delayed on the previous leg, and boarding time is about to start. Or when the airport cancels all flights for an indeterminate time due to incoming bad weather and the airlines wait to update times because they don't know what to say yet.

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A certain flight out of a certain airport (I won't say which one) was routinely delayed to the point that passengers waiting for the inevitable compounding series of delay announcements (always after the predicted departure time had passed, and before the plane had showed up much less been boarded) would make small talk about it. Predicting that these flights would be delayed every. damn. time. was not difficult. However, if the insurance companies eliminate this face-saving measure for airlines then they may be forced to be realistic rather than maximally optimist in their departure estimates in the future (or simply be blacklisted by these kinds of insurance).

Yes I do know by experience that it is very easy to deduce if a flight will be delayed. By experience in Europe, last leg of the day of an Easyjet flight -> 75% chance that your flight will be delayed. Snow during the night (look at the forecast) -> 90% your morning flight will be delayed etc. etc. No need for an advance ML model. Of course what she did was more like insider trading, but I'm pretty sure that you don't even need that.

The difficulty to make money out of this might be to determine the delay with some accuracy, not just that there will be some delays. Flight are routinely delayed by tens of minutes (has a low-cost flight ever left on time?) and that won't award compensation.

European laws define mandatory compensations when a flight is delayed or cancelled. This starts after 30 minutes if I remember well and depends how long the delay is and how long (distance) the flight is.

Also, delay is measured on arrival time, not on departure time. Planes frequently depart late then arrive on time, because they fly faster to catch up.

It was 2 hours, but recently they changed to 3

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

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