I am indeed talking about ground effect–that's why I included a link for "flying close to the surface reduces aerodynamic drag" which explains how it works.
I also specifically addressed how algorithms differ from memes in footnotes 4 and 14.
Flight Penguin picks up where Hipmunk left off. Our browser extension was featured in The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/5/22368466/flight-penguin-se...) and Fast Company (https://www.fastcompany.com/90622190/flight-penguin-travel-s...). We're helping people with the pain of searching travel and using loyalty points across all airlines. We deliberately eschew any payments from airlines to keep our interests aligned with our users. We're looking for an experienced technical leader to join as co-founder and CTO.
You'll get no argument here that it's hand-wavy! My goal was to point out that both our immune systems and our minds are imperfect at assessing threats and we can suffer greatly as a result. I'm glad you still found it thought-provoking.
If you are able to deal with existential threats without "feeling the slightest bit anxious or paranoid," you are very fortunate and not the intended audience :)
I agree, however, that planning is often helpful for reducing anxiety, insofar as it reduces uncertainty.
Thanks for sharing! I agree that certain anxieties are "rational." As I mentioned at the end of this piece, my second essay in this series will be about why people get anxious about different things. Look forward to hearing your thoughts on how my model for that compares to your research.
We get our data from mostly the same sources, so this should almost never happen. (There are also lots of times we have better rates than Kayak, e.g. on Amtrak and Airbnb, which they don't have.) Next time you see this, could you email [email protected]?
We would love to integrate Southwest! Unfortunately, they don't let anyone do that. You'll find other low-cost carriers on Hipmunk, though.
Southwest offers a lot of flights between SFO and LAX, but it's not true that the big carriers don't. I did a search on June 25 one-way SFO-LAX. Southwest has 12 non-stops. Delta has 11, and United has 16.
It depends on the kind of traveler (business travelers have shorter lead-time, leisure travelers have longer), but 3 weeks is a reasonable guess—probably on the shorter end—for what Google customers will be looking for.
No tears over here! We've known this was coming for almost a year—Google announced their ITA acquisition before we even launched. We've also been preparing some sweet responses :)
Possibly due to a fare update happening around the time you did the search. When I do that search on Hipmunk I see a lowest fare of $899 (http://www.hipmunk.com/#!ORD_HNL,Dec28_Jan05@0,0) for a one-stop flight in each direction. Kayak's price is the same for the same itinerary.
Admittedly Kayak has one flight for $870 and a few for $896, but they involved two stops.