Nate Silver tackles airline delays at 'FiveThirtyEight'

There's a new voice offering help to fliers trying to sift through the information for on-time airline flights.

That voice belongs to Nate Silver, who today rolled out a new airline-focused feature on his FiveThirtyEight website that's now part of the ESPN media family. Silver, of course, is the data guru who gained national attention with his on-target forecasts during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

Now, Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight have crunched reams of federal data on flight times to produce an interactive tool that gives fliers a new way to evaluate airline delay information.

"Flight delays cost the equivalent of about $160 billion a year in lost productivity, which is about 1% of the whole economy," Silver says to Today in the Sky. "Better ways to avoid them would be something good. To be able to claw even a few minutes of that back seems like it's valuable to me."

To help fliers do that, Silver says FiveThirtyEight's tool will not look at on-time information in the traditional metric, which simply counts a flight as "on-time" if it arrives within 15 minutes of its scheduled time or "late" if it does not.

Instead, the FiveThirtyEight feature will take a different tack. It will look at a "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." Then, that data will be crunched against data that shows 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."

Silver says the tool will help fliers 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 versus 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 the routes between New York and Chicago O'Hare.

Silver says it's "just about the worst route you can fly in the country, because both the airport of departure and the airport of arrival have significant delays. 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."

Silver says that has a significant effect on American and United, the two airlines that operate a large hub at O'Hare.

"If the flight is that slow, then do you blame American and United – or are they doing as well as they can relative to flying this very busy route between very congested airports?" Silver asks.

That's one of the data sets the FiveThirtyEight airline tool intends to put in front of fliers. Among other options, Silver says visitors can compare how different airlines do on the same route.

"Sometimes the differences are surprisingly large," he says.

To illustrate the point, he points to flights between Los Angeles and San Francisco. "There's a 30-minute difference between Virgin America, which is the best performing carrier, and Southwest," Silver says.

Aviation enthusiasts eager to dig through FiveThirtyEight's numbers can check out the tool themselves. It debuted around 1 p.m. ET.

The interactive graphic will have a dedicated spot on FiveThirtyEight and will be updated monthly, drawing data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.