Posted on 07/25/22
| News Source: Globes
With formidably long lines at Ben Gurion airport as 70,000-80,000 passengers per day passing through each day, many travelers are wondering just how long before a flight they should get to the airport. Google Israel head of engineering Tzahi Zilbershtein, 36, may have the answer for you.
Zilbershtein, who travels abroad twice monthly because he manages dozens of employees around Europe, set up a site, which predicts how crowded the airport is likely to be so that he could save wasting time at Ben Gurion airport. He has now opened the site/app to the public.
The site, which is only in Hebrew, forecasts how busy the arrivals hall, check-in, and security checks in Terminal 1 and Terminal 3 are likely to be under five ratings: deserted, light, medium, heavy, and peak.
Zilbershtein says, "The algorithm examines the congestion-level of takeoffs according to a mathematical model that I have built and tells you about the degree of crowding at any given time in the check-in and security halls." He adds that passengers can provide real-time reports on the site on whether the airport is more congested or less congested than predicted and thus influence the index presented and make the results of the algorithm more accurate.
The site/app provides forecasts for the next 72 hours. He says, "The data is based on information from the Israel Airports Authority. The information on flights is available to the public and there is a government application programming interface that relates to the next 72 hours. The congestion in takeoffs is an important statistic and it's possible to learn a lot about the congestion at the airport.