When to buy airline tickets: Getting the cheapest flights

Don't forget the Farecast technology at Bing Travel which predicts whether you should buy or wait for your airline ticket which has a fairly high accuracy rate.

On a related note, is there a sensible implementation for cheap flights hunting with flexible dates?

Guys from Hipmunk have been promising it for about a year by now. And yet I still find myself forced to try different dates manually.

Admittedly anecdontal, but I've always found 4 weeks before to be the optimal point.

The articles don't seem to give a specific answer (aside from a time and day of the week,) but sounds like the consensus is 3 p.m. EST on Tuesday, your best bet being 8 weeks before traveling.

From personal experience, once you hit the 3 week mark, you're pretty much SOL until the last few days, since most seats have been sold at that point. If there are still plenty of seats (orbitz sometimes shows you the seating chart,) you'll have better results than on fuller flights.