By law, airlines are required to compensate travelers for flight delays or cancellations, but as anyone who has tried knows, the process is a nightmare. So much so that some businesses thrive solely on their offer to buy your claim and carry out the compensation process on your behalf. That is about to change. FlightDelay , a new Ethereum based smart contract DApp, wants to bring air travel to the 21 st century by replacing the cumbersome claiming process with a very short and friendly form. As long as you have MetaMask installed, you enter flight details by selecting departure, arrival, date and then you see this: FlightDelay Daap Test Run I’ve entered a premium of 0.5 ETH for the random flight I picked. If there are no delays, I receive nothing back. If the flight is delayed by 15 to 29 minutes, which occurs about 20.34% of the time, I am sent 0.95 ETH to my MetaMask wallet. That’s it. I just click apply and we’re done. The hidden, complicated, technical backend code manages the rest and ensures I get automatically paid if the independent data says the flight is delayed. Stephan Karpischek, founder of FlightDelay, who previously worked as Researcher at ETH Zurich and Business Analyst at UBS, speaking to CCN , states: “We get numbers from flightstats.com, their API. We calculate the probabilities from [their] historic data, last three months typically. If the probability of a delay is higher the payout will be lower… in the end it is almost a zero-sum game, except for the fees we need to pay for the API and Oraclize.” It’s all open source, so everything can be easily checked. The more technically inclined can also play around with the code. For the rest, it’s a dynamic website that just […]
