A service for airline passengers called Flightcaster (www.flightcaster.com/) now predicts whether a flight is going to be delayed – before (if) it actually gets delayed.

Flightcaster

Once they’ve established your trust by accurately predicting a delayed flight, Flightcaster will help you re-book flights.

Here’s a prediction before it happens – Flightcaster is going to be a phenomenal hit, and travel companies and carriers providing services to airline consumers would be well advised to not miss this boat.  

The site uses publicly available historical data about an airline fed into their patent-pending algorithm which matches the data with real-time conditions, and provides results using predictive AI. The algorithm takes into accountr in-bound aircraft tracking, weather forecasts, FAA monitoring and 10 years of flight history.

The founders include Jason Freedman (Management) and Bradford Cross (a former Google consultant and expert in statistical research, clojure, and machine learning) in just over a month at a cost which is only in 4 figures, funded by Y Combinator.

This could get really interesting, if we can keep track of the ratio of their successful predictions vs those which come a cropper. They’re saying their algorithm can catch upto 95% of all delays, barring freak mechanical failure.

You can check for flight status on the website, but the primary focus is on their mobile app. Flightcaster offers applications for both the iPhone and Blackberry for $10 each. As part of a launch promotion, the apps are currently priced at $5 each.

According to Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch (via Dennis Schaal), Flightcaster also plans to generate revenue by offering corporate customers a dashboard from which they can monitor the flight status of multiple employees, which would allow companies to coordinate around delays.

Flightcaster is limited to domestic flights at the moment, although Canadian flights and international flights to/from the US are planned for later releases.