United Airlines may rank last among traditional carriers in customer satisfaction studies, but the company wants you to know that it's looking at ways to improve passenger service. That includes offering better options to customers during the stressful time of inclement weather.

During an interview with David Brancaccio of the public radio program Marketplace, United Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz offered an example of how the company is using Farmers' Almanac to put better plans in place during weather disruptions this winter:

Q. We get that you can't control the weather, but when flights do get canceled or they run late, passengers can see if an airline responds in an orderly way, or in a haphazard way. Are you making progress there? A. Oh, absolutely. I think the hardest thing that historically the industry may have relied upon is the fact that we can't control weather, we can't control air traffic control and use that at the end of the day as an excuse. Things do happen. We know they happen. We don't know exactly when they're going to happen. But we should definitely be prepared. A very quick example: Farmers' Almanac is calling for a very nasty winter. Particularly in Chicago, one of our main hubs. So as we speak, our operating team is hard at work as to how are we going to accommodate passengers. Not our aircraft, not the operations behind it, but the humans that fly us. That's what the important difference is at United.

It should go without saying, but Farmers' Almanac has no credibility in the meteorological science community. Its seasonal forecasts are made by "Caleb Weatherbee," who is described on the publication's website as the official forecaster for the Farmers' Almanac. The site explains: "His name is actually a pseudonym that has been passed down through generations of Almanac prognosticators and has been used to conceal the true identity of the men and women behind our predictions."

The publication's managing editor, Sandi Duncan, told Mental Floss that its predictions are the products of "top secret mathematical formulas that take into consideration things like sunspot activity, tidal action, and planetary positioning." Duncan said the formula is so secret that even she doesn't know it. But for something to have scientific credibility, it must be repeatable and published by its researchers. A secret formula produced under a pseudonym meets neither criteria—it is, rather, pseudoscience.

Ars reached out to United Airlines to determine the extent to which its seasonal weather planning is really based on the Farmers' Almanac. A spokesman, Charles Hobart, responded, "The safety of our customers is our top priority when making operating decisions. We listen to weather experts who support us in forecasting the upcoming season, and our network ops employees undergo extensive severe weather preparation training every year."