EP 01 — Airports

Your delay wasn't weather. It was math.

Every episode of MATH vs. VIBES starts the same way: Thomas asks a question he swears can't be modeled, and Eric spends the week building a real, interactive model that answers it. Then Thomas sees it cold, on camera, and explains why it's not what he asked for. A scoreboard keeps it honest.

Episode 1's question arrived as a text from an airport gate, where Thomas's "one-hour weather delay" was quietly becoming three:

There's an incredible amount of almost incomprehensible variability. How can you create a system that is priced that meets that?

What Eric built

A deterministic discrete-event simulation of one real day of US domestic flying: June 12, 2025, all 21,261 flights, from the federal on-time record (schedules, actuals, tail numbers). Delays propagate three ways: down each aircraft's rotation (late plane in, late flight out), through airport capacity queues (how weather becomes a cross-airline failure), and into cancellations via a crew duty-day proxy. You can replay the day exactly as it happened, then pull the knobs and watch the counterfactual cascade.

The headline finding: the #1 cause of delay is earlier delay. "Late-arriving aircraft" accounts for 5x the delay minutes that weather does. The system doesn't break. It melts.

Go deeper

From this episode's receipts

The best and worst times to fly, from 7,001,619 flights · The morning America stopped flying