How Google Can Make You Miss Your Flight
It was an unusually warm February afternoon in Bangalore. I was at a conference in the outskirts of the city and was starting to get fidgety about my flight to Delhi that was scheduled to leave in a few hours. Fidgety because Bangalore’s traffic can really get out of hand and have you stuck on the road for hours.
This is when my Android phone flashed a notification from Google that my flight has been delayed. I was relieved. Now I will definitely make it in time I said to myself.
The conference done with, I hailed a cab to the airport convinced that I would make it in time now, irrespective of how bad the traffic got.
Thankfully, there wasn’t much traffic and I reached with a lot of time in hand or so I thought. As I sauntered to the baggage drop off counter, I casually said to the airline executive, “I hope there is no further delay.”
It was an AirAsia India flight. The executive said with a smile, “But there’s no delay, Sir. The flight’s on time.”
I realised I had just made it in the nick of time.
I showed the official the Google notification, and he told me that many passengers through the day had missed their flights as Google Now was sending wrong information about flight delays. And that the airline has lodged a complaint about it.
Complaint to who, I never found out, nor the number of passengers that missed their flights that day. Because, the clock was ticking and I had to run to the security check.
But before I made a run to the security check, the airline official had a word of advice. He said never rely on any information on flight timing unless sent by the airline itself. Lesson learnt, I said to myself.
Google on its website tells you how to stay up to date with flight delays, but it doesn’t say how it actually tracks it.
Google has a flight tracker search feature that enables users to see flight status for arriving and departing flights in the US. “When users type the name of the airline and the flight number (e.g. “united 741”) into the search box, Google will return updated flight information from flightstats.com,” Google says on its website.
I mailed Google India enquiring about the tracking mechanism here, but they didn’t respond. However, it is most likely that they rely on flightstats.com or a similar real-time flight tracker for India as well.
I spoke to a Vistara pilot and he said, “A flight will have a given route and if it has taken off X minutes late, it is likely to land later than the scheduled arrival, that’s how tracking works. Then there’s turnaround time for the same flight to make the journey back, such things are factored in by flight-trackers while updating information.
“However, a plane can make up for departure delay either in the same leg or the next, while in the air and the flight-trackers or Google are not factoring that, hence such errors can happen,” he said.
On a parting shot he echoed what the AirAsia official had told me, “always and only go with information that the airline sends you.”
So, next time you’re flying and Google sends you notifications about your schedule, you may just want to cross-check with the airline. Else, you may be left huffing and puffing at the airport with a missed flight and nobody but yourself to blame. You’ve been warned.
