Why Airlines Make Flights Longer On Purpose (bbc.com)

dryriver shares a report from the BBC: In the 1960s it took five hours to fly from New York to Los Angeles, and just 45 minutes to hop from New York to Washington, DC. Today, these same flights now take six-plus hours and 75 minutes respectively, although the airports haven't moved further apart. It's called "schedule creep," or padding. And it's a secret the airlines don't want you to know about, especially given the spillover effects for the environment. Padding is the extra time airlines allow themselves to fly from A to B. Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays experienced for decades into their schedules instead of improving operations.

"On average, over 30% of all flights arrive more than 15 minutes late every day despite padding," says Captain Michael Baiada, president of aviation consultancy ATH Group citing the U.S. Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report. The figure used to be 40% but padding -- not operational improvements -- boosted on-time arrival rates. 'By padding, airlines are gaming the system to fool you." He says if instead airlines tackled operational issues, customers would directly benefit. "Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 which means if airline efficiency goes up, costs go down, benefitting both the environment and fares."

Comments

Re:Realistic number

[Stolpskott]

For some people, it would make no difference. But for the vast majority of people, being in the air for an extra 30 minutes would actually be less arduous than landing and being close enough that you could (regulations aside) walk the last few steps.
An illustrative anecdote that I saw a few years ago was about the design of a new airport terminal (I think it might have been Terminal E at Dallas Fort Worth or one of the newer terminals at Atlanta, but I am not 100% sure and my Google skills are as bad as usual...). The architects and designers were very vocal about how much time, effort, and new-fangled computer simulation time they had spent in optimizing the passenger off-boarding, minimizing the time and distance from deplaning to the passengers getting to the public areas.
Almost everybody who flew into that terminal hated it.
Why? Because while it was incredibly quick to get through the whole process if you only had carry-on luggage, the baggage handling system was the same as at every other airport. So people found that they got through security and to the baggage claim area very quickly, but they were waiting a long time for their luggage.
How was it solved? With a brand new automated baggage handling and prioritization system?
No... it was solved by giving passengers who were deplaning an artificially long route from the Arrivals Gate to Security, and from there to the Baggage Claim. The goal was that the passengers and their baggage should arrive at about the same time.
It worked... people now loved (or at least liked) arriving at the new terminal, because they were able to get to Baggage Claim, pick up their luggage (or wait a minute or two for it to arrive) and go.
The fact that they were not actually saving any time with the new process (no change was made to the baggage handling system, it was still operating at the same speed as before) was irrelevant and un-noticed. All that changed was the passenger perception - they were kept busy by walking, just long enough for everything else around them to work.

People are stupid. As babies, our parents give us brightly coloured toys to distract us and keep us quiet. As we get older, the toys get more expensive, but there are all sorts of adults giving us things to achieve the same goal, and sometimes we even do it to ourselves.