"A beard does not constitute a philosopher."
Don't judge a book by its cover, in other words.
How do you find out about people then? Ask. If you can't ask directly, listen to them.
The people above, left to right:
Friedrich Nietzsche - philosopher, mustache, no beard
Grigori Rasputin - non-philosopher (mystic), full-beard
The first is that the number of fights is still down 63%. That is the sky is half-empty view.
The above data is from flightradar24.com. If you have never looked at that site, it tracks air traffic through a network of individual devices which read the transponders of aircraft. I run a tracking site on a Raspberry Pi, just for fun, so I have access to the data.
I have an app in the Apple App Store called Fly Or Delay. It shows airport delays based on the FAA's data. It doesn't show individual flight delays, but you can generally get a sense of what is going to happen to your flight if you see there is a ground stop at your departing airport, for example. I admit that I spend a fair amount of time looking at the app, not just because I wrote it, but because it is interesting.
Look at the three screen shots above. I'll wait...
The right-hand one is the typical one I have seen in the last month: There are no delays. Period.
