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

Airline scheduling

[fustakrakich]

It's like Scotty, How else can they keep their reputation as a miracle worker?

The repair needs two weeks. I'll have it done in six hours

Re:Airline scheduling

[omfglearntoplay]

I have a feeling it has more to do with sharing runways with more flights, sharing air traffic control with more flights, and sharing the air with more flights.

If you had 100 flights a day in the 1960s out of airport X, and now you have 5000 flights out of that same airport... somehow I don't think they expanded the airport enough to keep up.

Realistic number

[Anonymous Coward]

So, instead of reporting the best possible time that they can only occasionally achieve in ideal conditions, they are now reporting times they can usually achieve. I wish electric car manufacturers would start doing that for their cars ranges. If I recall, airlines did not start doing this until they started to be fined for being late.

Re:Realistic number

[Kohath]

Basically, yeah. They are telling the truth (more or less) about how long the travel takes now.

Re:Realistic number

[Obfuscant]

Only on /. would people complain that a corporation is being more honest about the time it takes to get from point A to point B.

Airlines used to plan best-case travel times, and many times that didn't happen. That could be for any number of reasons having nothing at all to do with their operations. Diverting around weather, lineups for departure, delays for landing due to weather, etc. Airlines aren't just flying around in circles to waste gas because they're 15 minutes early and have to arrive exactly on the padded arrival time, and being late impacts much more than just the people on that one flight.

Outside of major issues, most of the flights I have been on have arrived early. It is actually a Good Thing when something does delay a flight and it still arrives on schedule. It's actually a Great Thing when a small delay in departure can result in no delay in arrival. It's a Really Bad Day when a plane arrives too late to make connections, because that can result in multi-day delays in people getting to final destinations.

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.

It makes me feel good when I'm early...

[Arzaboa]

I know this stuff is padded, and I think its great.

I do the same thing when I'm the driver of any trip. I plan for 9am, tell everyone else to be ready by 7:30am or 8am, and when we get a 'head-start' of 15 minutes everyone is happy. It helps when 'life' is baked into these times. I don't want to stress because someone takes an extra five minutes moving a luggage cart. I am not going to complain if I arrived in Chicago 'early.' Airline route times are there for customer service and this saves me so many headaches on the back-end that I call it one of the perks. Quiet time.

--
One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening. -- Franklin P. Jones

Re:It makes me feel good when I'm early...

[msauve]

What you describe is one of the few things good about Disney - underpromise/overdeliver. When you're in line and the sign says you have a 30 minute wait for a ride, it's realistically more like 20. If it's less than they say you're happy, if it's more you're pissed.

But yeah, the article/summary is extremely biased. "Because these flights were consistently late, airlines have now baked delays..." is just a biased way of saying they realized they were wrong, and fixed it. And it completely ignores the importance of schedules when there are connecting flights - I'd much rather sit at a gate for an extra 15 minutes than miss a connection and have to wait hours.

No, they're not wasting fuel and melting glaciers. Time is money, and they want to get there as soon as they can. But there are lots of moving parts not under direct control (think weather, equipment issues, and other airlines). The summary's comparison to 50 years ago is simple ignorance (at best, otherwise deliberate misrepresentation) - there are now way more flights and there's way more complexity/chaos to affect flight times.

questionable logic

[whizzard]

From the summary, at least, it sure doesn't seem like this guy knows what he's talking about:

Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2

Padding the schedule, alone, clearly can't change the amount of fuel that is used to get from point A to point B.

Re:questionable logic

[LynnwoodRooster]

If anything, it should REDUCE the CO2 emissions, because if you have 30 minutes to "kill" on a long leg, you can fly slower - and since losses go as the square of velocity, a small reduction in airspeed really saves quite a bit of fuel. In fact, that's why the A380 is "slow" across the Pacific - it flies slower so it saves more fuel than a B777/787 doing the same trip (15 hours from LAX to CAN versus 13-13.5 for the Boeing planes).

Actually, part of it makes sense

[WindBourne]

If you read further down in the article, you find that this company is selling software that is supposed to improve things.
Yet, I doubt it. Weather is your real issue.
For example, the good captain speaks about flights coming in too late or too early and how his software improves that. Fact is, if a flight leaves late, and flight crew does nothing, then it will likely arrive late (tailwind could change things). So, a good flight crew will ask ATC for more direct routes and will likely cruise at faster speeds (however, increasing fuel usage).

Yeah, I do not buy what he is saying. He is just marketing.

Cruise Speed difference.

[WindBourne]

One other thing that was not considered. Back in the 60s, fuel was cheap, esp. in America. Jet engines burn through it amazing fast. Well, the early 707 and 727 had Jet engine. It was only in the last 60s that turbofans came into being with the 747-100 being the first to use one. But, jet engines are faster than turbofans. The early 7[023]7 moved at mach .8-.9. Now, most are .75-.85.

That was why Boeing wanted to develop the SOnic Cruiser which would cruise at mach .98. But airlines want cheap to operate, which means better fuel efficiency.

Conspiracy level bullshit

[topham]

This article is conspiracy level bullshit. Correcting schedules for realistic time isn't about not fixing things that can be fixed, it's about accepting those that can't.

There isn't an airline on the planet that wouldn't choose to save fuel costs if given the chance.

Really?

[ledow]

Surely that's just good schedule management.

"When we say we get there at 8, we struggle and usually only arrive at 8:30 on average. Therefore, it makes sense to tell people that we arrive at 8:30."

I can't see anything wrong with that.

Sure, maybe not "the fastest achievable time" but they don't claim that. Doing so would be stupid as it would open them up to all kinds of lawsuits.

I don't care about the technicalities. I want to know what time the plane (and therefore I) will get there, so that I can arrange to be picked up.

If one airlines says they can get me there for 8, and another for 9, and I need to be there for 8, guess what? I'll use that one in preference. Similarly, if I have to get there as soon as humanly possible, I'll use the airline that has the earliest arrival time, and others will have different times - whether that's because of the trip they take, the risks they avoid en-route, or their operational efficiency, it doesn't really matter does it?

Of all the accusations you could level at airlines "they gave us a more realistic time because they noticed that they couldn't always hit their promised time before" is hardly a bad one.