YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed | Hacker News Reader

YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed

techcrunch.com

107 pointsmgcreed27 comments

I can't help but imagine pilots checking the statuses of their own flights, thousands of feet up in the air, punching the gas to beat their odds.

Congrats on launching!

I have a neat viral marketing / mailing list building idea for you if you like - a local radio news station here has a "weather guarantee".

They have a pool of prize money which increases daily. Every day on the radio they say what their guaranteed weather high is - if they don't hit it, they pick a name from their member database and give them the pool and start over again. Therefore you must join their database in order to win the prize - and the contest itself reaffirms the accuracy of the radio broadcast (if they are willing to be against their weather estimates they must be good!)

What you can do is have the same model with a daily flight time guarantee, and give away a free copy of the app as a prize. People who are going to buy your app will likely do it anyways, so this is a way to collect all the info of the "tire kickers" so you can slowly remind them over 3-12 months why they should buy your app. The viral part can come from getting additional entries in the pool by recommended your friends.

Just a random thought that popped in my head - something to consider while you have all this early launch hype surrounding you..

I am flying this Friday so I will make sure to test it out. That's a pretty steep price for the iPhone app though... if you guys can recommend me alternative routes then that would be worth paying for, but at the current stage I don't see myself paying for an app just to check if my flight will be delayed or not.

When I was a consultant, I used to travel every week. What irritated the heck out of me is these in-route weather conditions. So for instance, if I am flying from Dallas to NY, and there's bad weather somewhere in the middle, they will cancel the flight. If you can recommend me to get on a flight that will go around the problem (such as Dallas -> Miami, Miami -> NY), then it would be really useful. But this is probably only useful for business travelers since casual travelers probably won't be willing to shell out the extra airfare.

I am more than happy to shell out $4.99 as a casual traveller. The reason -why- my flight is delayed is way more information than the airlines give you. Knowledge is power.

I've been burned by United several times when they have lied or not disclosed delay information to me. This app could have saved me hundreds of dollars and tons of anxiety last year.

That's a pretty steep price for the iPhone app

I vehemently object. This is an EXTREMELY valuable service, not a fart generator or lightsaber, and you should proudly charge $10, $15, $20, or more! You can always lower the price later but now is your only chance to establish a high perceived value for your product.

Well, I just officially tested the service.

According to FlightCaster my flight is 85% chance of being on-time, but after getting to the airport my flight is delayed. I am waiting at the gate right now, and no reasons were given by the airline.

I am sure it's not weather related since it's SF to LA... and the site still says it will be on-time. How frequently do you update the forecasts?

Hi Frocer, sorry I missed this. can you ping me directly with mroe info? bradford dot n dot cross at gmail dot com

I'm trying to understand how this differs from http://www.tripit.com/

I think tripit tells you delays when the airline/faa actually announces delays, vs flightcaster which tries to do it earlier.

Read this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/13.html

It's pretty rare for airlines to be honest about delays at departure time. Rather than update their online databases when they know they're running late, they wait until the flight has taken off, because then they only have to update it once. It's pretty maddening. I can't tell you how often I've been standing at a gate with a big LED sign that says ON TIME for, say, a 5 pm departure, when the current time is 5:30 and there's no aircraft in sight.

For frequent travellers this may give you enough information to get rebooked before everybody else does. For example if there's an 8AM flight and a 10AM flight, but the 8AM flight is running 3 hours late, there's going to be a stampede to get rebooked on the 10AM flight, which might only have a few empty seats. The first person to figure this out is going to get one of those seats. This app is very reasonably priced for the audience of frequent flyers who would benefit from it.

Joel, I didn't realize you had a rant on this topic. :-)

It is always great to see that other people are as annoyed by this as I am.

It feels great to attack this problem with modern technology! :-)

Joel - you are spot on with this... I've seen this happen so many times. They don't want people to leave the gate, so they'll trickle out delays (15mins, 30mins another 15mins).

The other one I love -- When they are late they announce it as "due to late arrival of the incoming aircraft". Not sure what this is exactly meant to mean, but to me this is "we're late".

Root cause analysis isn't really their strength, in their announcements anyway. Do they think people would get upset if they knew the core reason for the problem or something?

Yes, the on-time numbers are really shady. Because so much of an airline's performance is measured by their on-time percentage, they find all kinds of tricks to stretch the truth and shave minutes off the reported delay times. These numbers can significantly affect their funding, performance reviews, regulatory oversight, contracts with airports, unions, etc.