Kalshi plans to let its customers place contracts on the timeliness of airlines.
Flight delays and cancellations have become a chaotic staple of travel. Now, the prediction market is willing to put money down that people would like to cash in on the dysfunction. The company filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday that it would offer bets on these frustrations, prompting onlookers to predict all sorts of degenerative outcomes.
Kalshi has offered similar contracts in the past, but those were related to nationwide cancellations.
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Kalshi said in the filing that it would use the flight-tracking site FlightAware to decide on contracts, but the site’s parent company told the Wall Street Journal that it’s not on board.
“No company is — or will be — authorized to use the data collected through the FlightAware network for this purpose,” a spokesman told the outlet.
Stories about how bettors used insider information to gain an unfair advantage on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket are growing increasingly common. Now, the internet has come to the conclusion that gamblers will put their life’s savings on a delayed flight and then act to delay said flight.
The change reminded some of a Seinfeld episode where Kramer bet on arrivals and departures while lounging in a terminal.
Important caveat
People won’t be able to cash in on a bet about a cancellation that they later cause. Kalshi said in its filing that bets will be structured on an entire-airport timeliness basis.
In other words, “Will <above/below/between/exactly/at least> <percentage> of scheduled <flight category> flights at <airport> be canceled in <time period>?” will be the question that bettors will put money on.
For instance, the filing will let a Kalshi customer place a $100 bet saying “A blizzard is forecast; airlines pre-emptively cancel 500 of the 1,000 scheduled flights the evening before <time period> begins, and 30 additional scheduled flights are canceled during <time period>. The percentage canceled is 53.00%.”
While one canceled flight might move the needle up or down, gamblers can’t wager on the one flight being affected.
Sorry, Kramer.
Ethics of betting on everything
The novel ability to bet on seemingly random world events has led to people attempting to use any kind of insider knowledge to gain an unfair advantage.
In April, Kalshi suspended three political candidates from its service after they were found to have wagered on their own candidacies. Ezekiel Enriquez of Texas, Mark Moran of Virginia and Matt Klein of Minnesota were all banned from using the service for five years.
One of the highest-profile instances of people using insider information to win big was the January news that a special forces operator won hundreds of thousands of dollars from his Polymarket bet that the U.S. would take down Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro just hours before it happened.
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