What Delays?

To comply with security and airline protocol, air travelers should arrive at the airport well in advance of their flight. Without realizing the probability of adverse conditions at the time of the scheduled departure, they may experience inconvenient delays at the airport. Delays can be short and relatively easy to manage, or they can cause long hours of waiting in crowded airports. Flight delays can even cause forced overnight stays at local hotels or inside the terminal. Travelers could benefit from knowing the likelihood of a delay as it could help them prepare for the wait time. Can an app be developed that predicts the impact of weather on airplane departure times?

Our goal is to prevent missed connecting flights by giving flyers and travel agents a better understanding of when to expect delays. Our solution uses machine learning to learn what weather patterns are likely to cause delays to specific airports and predict the amount of delay you can expect based on weather forecasts.

Historical Aircraft Delay data: http://www.transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectFields.asp?Table_ID=236

Historical Weather Data: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/isd-lite/

IBM Bluemix, transtats, https://www.wunderground.com, https://maven.apache.org/,https://spring.io/, https://github.com/dmlc/xgboost/tree/master/python-package, http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2012/CastilloLawson-PredictingFlightDelays.pdf