Will my flight be delayed?

• We used every domestic flight reported to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics over the past two years. A flight counts as delayed if it arrived 15+ minutes late, was cancelled, or was diverted.
• The model is a gradient-boosted tree ensemble (LightGBM). It looks at how often the airline, both airports, the route and this exact flight number have run late, plus time of day, day of week, month, how busy each airport is at that hour, and how close the date is to a major holiday.
• The plane itself matters. Late-arriving aircraft are the single biggest cause of delays in federal data, so the model looks at how late in the plane's day the flight usually runs, where the plane usually flies in from, and how much time is scheduled to turn it around. It also uses the aircraft type, age and size from the FAA aircraft registry, and whether a regional airline operates the flight for a major brand.
• It also looks at hourly weather at both ends: temperature, rain, snow, wind, gusts and cloud cover. Historical weather came from Open-Meteo's archive; your flight uses the live forecast.
• We used SHAP values to rank every feature by how much it moves predictions, and removed features that added nothing.

Tested on the most recent two months of flights, which the model never saw during training:

Features ranked by average impact on predictions (mean |SHAP value|).