30 ms·

Why airlines make flights longer on purpose

186 points by quickthrower2 8y ago

ohadron 8y ago
The title is misleading, it should be: "Why airlines are allocating and publishing longer flight times than are actually needed to fly a certain distance"
- heyoni 8y ago
  You saved me a click. Thank you!
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  And the answer: Because 40% of flights used to be late, now it's only 15%, reducing the amount of compensation airlines have to pay out. Moving the goalposts. The article tries to make it look like a bad thing, like they're skirting their responsibilities (avoiding payouts), not improving their efficiency and punctuality (which is down to late passengers, which they either have to wait for or have to remove their luggage for, OR other factors outside the airlines' control), and that it's bad for the environment. But what if, and this may sound totally wild here, what if the schedules were too tight to begin with and they've just been adjusted to compensate? I mean yes, the article makes mention that thanks to padding, a lot of flights seem to arrive early. But is that a bad thing? It means there's a lot more space to play around in. And planes can fly a bit slower, or fly at whatever speed they are most efficient at, instead of having to rush.
  - madeofpalk 8y ago
    > reducing the amount of compensation airlines have to pay out. To be fair though, the point of the compensation is because a delayed flight is _very_ inconvenient. If they're removing that inconvenience by landing at the time they said they would so you can make your plans, then that's completely fine.
  - gruez 8y ago
    >But what if, and this may sound totally wild here, what if the schedules were too tight to begin with and they've just been adjusted to compensate? In a perfect world this would be solved by having a 90/95/99% percentile arrvial window rather than an arrival time.
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      You can often get that data if it really matters to you (flightstats sells it, for example), but I’m not sure I want to be running an MCMC analysis every time I book a ticket.
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Moving the goalposts. Or perhaps more properly, re-setting expectations. If you can’t stick to your own schedule, give me one you can stick to. I’m of course reiterating what you already said (“adjusted to compensate”), but from a customer POV I’m going to be less upset if I’m early than if I’m late.
wastedhours 8y ago
Obviously we need to hold airlines to account to improve their environmental impacts, but I appreciate padding. I know I'm getting fooled, but if it makes sharing ETAs and making peace with a journey, I'd much rather it than be delayed continually. I think most of us can appreciate the logistical challenges keeping increasingly busy airports running on time, and whilst we need to ensure operational improvements are being made I don't think airlines are deliberately ignoring this (in an age of squeezed profits, being more efficient is the only way to go for them). Padding just makes sense.
- yiyus 8y ago
  Exactly my feelings. I agree efficiency should be improved, and I would like that total travel time got shorter, but I can accept a small margin to help them adjust if that will give me a consistent arriving time.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Exactly; if it was about operational efficiency, then airlines would be able to reduce padding to a minimum, which in turn would allow them to have planes ready to depart much quicker, which will allow them to fly more and thus make more money. I don't get the angle that it's the airlines that don't want to improve their efficiency.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  We are not even being fooled. The claim that someone is being fooled when a flight follows its published schedule is nonsense. It is also nonsense to suggest that this somehow removes incentives for airlines to be more efficient, as inefficiency has its costs. The whole article has the petulant tone of someone having a hissy fit over not getting everything he would like.
golemotron 8y ago
I've read that the reason why flights have gotten longer is fuel efficiency. Flying slower saves fuel. This was a strategy adopted when fuel prices spiked years ago and it was kept in place because of cost competition.
- dingaling 8y ago
  You shouldn't be downvoted, average cruise speeds now are less than in the 1980s and considerably less than in the 1960s. And modern short / medium haul airliners are designed for lowet cruising speeds. Ryanair notoriously uses a very aggressive Cost Index for flight planning which favours absolute economy over speed, to the extent that sometimes ATC complains about their low cruising speed More about CI: https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Cost_Index https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Cost_Index
tyingq 8y ago
Hard to reconcile the title with this observation: "Part of the problem is schedules are designed by airlines for perfect conditions". There's a lot of available info for US flight delays at bts.gov One good example: https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/understanding-reporting-causes-flight-delays-and-cancellations https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/understandi...
S_A_P 8y ago
I dont think this article is completely correct, and I dont see padding as a "trick". If the arrival window is more accurate by adding padding to the flight time, then I can plan more effectively when I get to my destination. Aren't airliners also flying slightly slower than they used to in an effort to save fuel(and lower emissions)?
cletus 8y ago
The "What airlines don't want you to know" tone of this post is misplaced and misguided. I also question the suggestions that longer published flight times mean more CO2 and there's no incentive for airlines to become more efficient. Here the airlines are doing pretty much exactly what I, as a passenger, want, which is to predictably arrive at an airport by a certain time more often. If a plane takes less time to fly somewhere some of the time because of weather, timely takeoff from departure airport, landing slot availability at the arrival airport or whatever, I don't really care. If they arrive late however, that can be a huge problem, particularly for making connections. As for CO2, the plane flying slower is more fuel-efficient. Isn't this lower CO2 emissions? 40 years ago there were so many fewer planes in the skies. You could fly as fast as you want, take off when you want (pretty much) and land when you want. Well, lack of satellite navigation and tracking mattered but basically the skies were less crowded. Just the other day I flew out of NYC and it took us 40+ minutes of being in a queue to take off behind 15-20 other planes because reasons. You have to have that padding in your schedule.
- deleted 8y ago
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- sjg007 8y ago
  NYC has always been subject to long delays... it’s a major pita.
- netsharc 8y ago
  > As for CO2 [...] 40+ minutes of being in a queue to take off Guess what the engines are doing at this time. Even worse if they tell planes to circle before landing because there are too many landings at this time.
  - jak92 8y ago
    > Guess what the engines are doing at this time. Usually one engine is turned off...
    - dx034 8y ago
lozenge 8y ago
I didn't understand how this is wasting fuel. Does ATC make them fly slower rather than landing early?
- aflag 8y ago
  Flying slower may actually reduce on emissions.
- Harvey-Specter 8y ago
  Theoretically a plane may have to sit in a holding pattern if it arrives too early, either due to congestion at the airport or not having a landing slot.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  The "wasting fuel" part is some submarine by Baiada that the BBC fell for
harperlee 8y ago
Is it really true that when flying at less speed you burn more fuel? If air resistance grows quadratically with speed, I would assume that it is not, but there might be another effects on wing efficiency that I ignore...
- danaliv 8y ago
  The drag/speed curve of an airplane is actually U-shaped. Parasitic drag does increase with speed, but induced drag—the drag that results from the production of lift—is highest at slow speeds. The combination of these two curves is a U. The bottom of the drag curve is the speed at which the airplane will achieve maximum range for a given quantity of fuel; 76% of that speed will achieve maximum endurance. The distinction between range and endurance is that of distance versus time. Max range will get the most distance out of one pound of fuel, while max endurance gets you the most time out of that pound of fuel.
- privateSFacct 8y ago
  Flying faster uses LOTS more fuel per mile travelled. It's not just the aero but also what engines are optimized for
- deleted 8y ago
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- AFascistWorld 8y ago
  Then Concord wouldn't be dead.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  Here is a pretty good article explaining the optimization between range and speed. http://code7700.com/aero_range_performance.htm http://code7700.com/aero_range_performance.htm
learnstats2 8y ago
I believe wind speed and direction has a significant effect on flight times - making them inherently unpredictable and risking knock-on effects.
xchip 8y ago
TL;DR: 1) planes fly at a lower speed to save fuel 2) help airlines to claim they have improved on-time (OT) flight performance 3) it makes it easier to swerve the “magical three-hour limit” on delays – the threshold that qualifies passengers to file compensation claims at least under European Union passenger rights’ law.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  #3 is a little annoying, especially when the airline is uncommunicative. It’s natural to assume that an N hour departure delay will cause you to arrive N hours late, and that your connections or other plans will be thrown off accordingly. However, that’s not often true—-schedule padding and changes in flight plans[0] often make up for some of the difference, though they often don’t tell you this until you’re in the air. It would be great if more gate agents could give you an expected departure AND arrival time during delays. [0] I would not be surprised at all if the airlines explicitly trade off fuel costs vs. the costs of compensation. In other words, if you’re already late, don’t waste fuel try to make up all of the lost time, but use just enough to avoid a compensation-triggering delay.
aaron695 8y ago
> Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 Where's this garbage, which is repeated multiple times, coming from? They say padding is just scheduling. The planes are not flying further according to the article. Why would an airline burn extra fuel because they are ahead of time? Also if behind in time they have to burn extra fuel to catch up. So if anything they are burning less by having buffers. Typically shitty BBC. So they might circle if there are fees for being early at the destination which are more than fuel, I would not think so, but if true THAT would be interesting. But they can just go slower on the way if informed of this, which should be more fuel efficient, but if this is not true this also would be interesting but I find unlikely.
rob74 8y ago
This is actually what any other mode of transportation that uses a schedule has to do: if you have a schedule, you have to take some precautions to ensure you can keep to the schedule most of the time, otherwise you can forget about the schedule. Here in Germany, this is very obvious for bus lines on streets that are usually very busy - they have so much "padding" in their schedule that on less busy days the buses have to travel at 30 km/h instead of 50 km/h to avoid running ahead of schedule.
- deleted 8y ago
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- Harvey-Specter 8y ago
  Here in Canada I've had to sit and wait on the bus while the drive goes into Tim Horton's (coffee shop) because the bus is ahead of schedule.
Someone1234 8y ago
This is a surprisingly poor article from the BBC. So, padding, according to this article has a negative environmental impact. But that argument isn't justified and doesn't make sense, most time lost is either unavoidable for the airline (e.g. airport problems/weather) or at a phase of travel without the engines running (boarding delays, waiting for a gate, etc). Flying slower is actually a environmental win since aircraft are more efficient at slower speeds (although costs more to the airline due to staffing/opportunity cost). They seem to want us to believe that if padding was removed, and airlines magically got more efficient, that they'd use less fuel but what is the mechanism? What phase of flight sees the fuel reductions? It is like they don't know that aircraft often use either ground-power or only the generator while waiting. In fact the core premise of the article is clickbait. Oh no, airlines are making sure you can plan your travel times accurately by accounting for common delays within a route! The horror! Sorry, but not biting today.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  >Flying slower is actually a environmental win since aircraft are more efficient at slower speeds Do you have any more information on this? Obviously slower-speed turboprop planes are much more efficient than jet powered planes, but I've read in the past that flying a jet engine slower can actually increase fuel consumption and increase emissions.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    There is an efficiency curve for jet transports. There is a defined MRC (max range cruise, which varies by weight) and a calculated LRC (long range cruise, typically defined as 1% less fuel efficient [in kg/nm], which gives 99% of efficiency and about 104% of cruise speed vs MRC). Modern flight management systems have economy calculators that can predict not only fuel-at-destination figures, but can incorporate winds and other airline cost indices (crew, maint reserves, etc) to emit an "ECON" speed target. It is only speeds below the MRC that cause a decrease in (still-air) fuel efficiency. Airlines do not typically operate in that speed range in cruise absent an ATC directive to slow down to avoid holding ahead. (Obviously, flying a hold is done below MRC as well.)
  - 8y ago
ensiferum 8y ago
"Increasing success by lowering expectations" ;-)
jillesvangurp 8y ago
A simple fix to incentivize more fuel economy is to stop excluding it from fuel taxation, as is still the case in a lot of places. E.g. most EU countries tax fuel for cars, quite heavily, but not for planes. This exemption is starting to look pretty backwards and there is a fair bit of lobbying going on by aviation companies to prevent this from happening. Low fuel prices currently allow planes to compete with trains for domestic flights in Germany even when the time gained is dubious at best. E.g. Berlin to Munich is a 50-60 minute flight and a 4 hour train journey. However, the train has no checkin and boarding queues and gets you from the downtown area of Berlin to the downtown area of Munich instead two 30-40 minute taxi rides away. If you factor that in, the train starts looking pretty damn good. Flying is still a little faster but so much less convenient. It might also inform their choices for looking more fuel efficient alternatives. E.g. Berlin-Munich is well in range of the several electrical planes currently under development. IMHO a fleet of hundreds of these could revolutionize domestic flights by allowing cheap, clean flights directly between small city airports that are currently impossible to fly to because of noise and runway length.
- MagnumOpus 8y ago
  > stop excluding it from fuel taxation Problem for this is that it needs coordination at least on a continent-spanning scale. If the UK decides to tax av fuel but any one of the Netherlands or France or Germany don't, Heathrow stops being a hub airport pretty damn quick, hurting both the economy and the flight options of southern England. Just like with corporate taxes, countries have an incentive for a race to the bottom, so coordinated action is needed.
  - gruez 8y ago
    >Problem for this is that it needs coordination at least on a continent-spanning scale Sounds like a job for EU and/or the US federal government.
- burfog 8y ago
  This is dangerous and would increase fuel usage. If the EU taxed jet fuel, airlines would then do several things: 1. They would load up with maximum fuel for inbound flights. Carrying all this extra fuel means they need to burn a bit more fuel for the inbound flight. 2. They would skimp on fuel for outbound flights. This produces a risk of a low-fuel emergency. 3. Many outbound flights would stop just outside the EU for fuel. The additional stop would burn more fuel. Norway, Iceland, Russia, Switzerland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Turkey would all become busy refueling stops.
andyst 8y ago
The article confuses the differing responsibilities of airlines, airports and air services (ATC) who then work together to deliver a realistic schedule. Airlines are motivated to maximise fleet utilisation so the narrow focus on padding is a misleading and overemphasised element to judge the intent of this specific delay mitigation. The industry is moving towards increasing collaboration, the article I think avoids mentioning the IATA recommended ACDM approach instead pitching a companies PoC from one of their sources.
objektif 8y ago
No kidding, an internatial route I take was 8.5 hours 8 years ago and now it is 11.5. I am not sure this is a result of padding or scheduling.
MatthewWilkes 8y ago
The JAL flights from London to Tokyo and back really annoyed me last year because of padding. The LHR to HND leg arrived 45 minutes early, which meant I had 45 minutes extra of early morning time in Tokyo and 45 minutes less snoozing to try and get ahead of the jetlag. The return trip was different, if the plane had departed on time it would have reached London at a time when inbound flights are not allowed due to noise restrictions. That meant it was about 2am by the time I was able to board the plane, again not ideal for sleeping.
bubbabojangles 8y ago
The hub and spoke system also contributes to the congestion we see at the airports. A distributed system would be more tolerant to issues like weather, and you can afford to pad flight schedules with little impact on congestion due to the fewer throughput of planes at any one airport. This of course may not make financial sense for the Airline to distribute their operations, would need to be regulated.
- lostapathy 8y ago
  We're already starting to see that change. As traffic has grown airlines have added more point-to-point flights that skip the hubs. Newer aircraft have also changed the economics of those route changes well and enabled more point-to-point flights that weren't previously economical.
Proven 8y ago
Tl;dr In order to deal with BS government regulations purportedly made to benefit passengers, airlines made flights slower and passengers suffer on every flight (and can't get comp'd for the time lost thanks to this government BS).
danielfoster 8y ago
This article is informative but poorly thought out. Most delays are out of the airlines’ control and generally involve congestion. Unlike 50 years ago when there was little air traffic and airlines could pick the most direct route, today that is no longer the case. Flights are indeed longer because flying the most direct route or the route with the best tailwinds is no longer possible. I’m surprised BBC didn’t do more fact checking.
el_cujo 8y ago
This really sounds like a non-issue. As a consumer, I'd much rather have them over estimate the flight schedule and arrive early than the reverse. I live near a smaller regional airport and end up having layovers basically anytime I fly anywhere more than 200 miles away, so I always relax a little easier when I pilot tells me we're landing ahead of schedule on my first leg so I know I wont miss my connection. As for carbon emissions, I'm guessing that whatever padded on time is spent at the gate isn't really an issue, it's more about drawn out approaches when landing. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that something like this happens when you have so many planes entering and leaving an airport, it's amazing to me that things go as smoothly as they do. Plane travel isn't going anywhere and it seems a little absurd to me that flight time needs to be completely min-maxed down to the minute due to carbon emissions, there are definitely easier and more effective ways to control this.
deleted 8y ago
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beager 8y ago
In my experience, fixing ground ops would be the biggest boon to efficiency and customer satisfaction. My experience these days from doing a lot of domestic flying in the U.S. is that lack of ground coordination (takeoff queues, gate availability, randomly sitting on the tarmac for an hour) cost a lot of money and time. If the state of planes in the sky can actively be used to optimize ground ops at airports, I think that'd help consumers and reduce some costs. Other than that, I think consumers could forgive the padding in flight times. If I take off 20 minutes late and still arrive 10 minutes early, I'm happy, so the psychology continues to work.
idlewords 8y ago
Beyond the considerations in this article, I've always found it fascinating that none of the big jets flying today is as fast in routine operation as the first American airliner, the 707. The difference is small, and the reason is partly to do with fuel economy, but it's a very good example of how technology doesn't always go forward in the expected direction. A similar analogy in computerland is how many of us are doing most of our computing on devices much less powerful than the ones we had ten years ago, a function of switching to mobile devices and high-overhead virtualized computing.
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  also capacity. larger plane need larger wing that enter into transonic regime earlier than smaller wing. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-rule/transonic-drag.jpg http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-rule/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number you want to be below or above transonic, and above transonic is banned pretty much anywhere.
ekianjo 8y ago
> However, this global trend poses multiple problems: not only does your journey take longer but creating the illusion of punctuality means there’s no pressure on airlines to become more efficient, meaning congestion and carbon emissions will keep rising. Am I missing something? It's not like flights are spending more time in the air compared to before - it's just that you wait longer and your flight leaves late vs schedule. So how does that increase carbon emissions?
alexhutcheson 8y ago
TL;DR: Airlines used to set SLOs that they couldn't hit consistently. They updated the SLOs based on actual performance, and now they hit them much more consistently. Article author seems to believe the pointy-haired boss idea that if they went back to the original (over-optimistic) SLOs then the airlines would somehow increase performance to hit them.
kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
HN can be funny. Since this is an article about the airline industry, a lot of people here are criticizing them for setting lower expectations and padding times. And this is an industry that deals with so many environmental, regulatory, administrative and personnel problems completely out of their control. On the other hand, if it's an article about how "PMs ruin software engineering by pushing for unrealistic deadlines", all of a sudden a job role that depends largely on just people and their (fairly reliable) computers justifies 2x or 3x the time estimates.
deepsun 8y ago
Why don't they just arrive early most of the time? For passengers, being early is as good as "A0".
kenneth 8y ago
Huh? This article is ridiculous. > 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. So… let me get this right… because the announced scheduled arrival time is announced as being an hour later than usual… somehow the plane spends more time in the air and is worse for the environment… I think the author missed their morning cup of coffee. > Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 Again, with the unsubstantiated and ludicrous claim that an airline giving itself room on the schedule for operational issues not to cause cascading effects somehow means more time in the air, more noise, and more emissions. I give up. I hope nobody takes this article seriously.
- AWildC182 8y ago
  Ok, I'm not the only one. For the most part the gate-to-gate timeline is extremely predictable. They already have the clearances set up and know what route they're flying so the flying bit is not really going to change much outside of unforeseen weather or traffic delays. The variable part is loading, unloading, and staffing issues (someone didn't make it to work) and occasionally absorbing the impact of flight delays. I suspect the net effect is actually a decrease in CO2 emission because the delay stack at the end of the day doesn't force pilots to bump the throttles a little to cut some time on flights with lots of connections as I've seen them do before.
dreamcompiler 8y ago
This article reads like a not-very-well-disguised ad for the methodology that Baiada is selling.
eqdw 8y ago
Problem: "Planes are consistently later than our stated arrival times" Solution: "Why don't we give more accurate arrival times, so passengers can be more confident in those stated arrival times and minimize disruption to their travel plans" The Guardian: "This is bad for the environment" Literally the article is saying that when airlines stopped optimistically lying about arrival time, this somehow poisoned the planet. Despite the fact that both before and after the change being complained about, flights took off at the same real timestamp, spent the same amount of real time in the air, and landed at the same real timestamp.
JudgeWapner 8y ago
I think the fallacy here is that they can just push back from the gate, trot directly to the runway and takeoff. In any major airport, that's a crapshoot. I've been spending a lot of time watching ground ops from http://www.airportviewer.com/airport/KSFO http://www.airportviewer.com/airport/KSFO (courtesy of HN, posted a few months ago). There are times when the planes pile up 14 deep. I saw JFK up to 20 planes on the ground waiting. This is hardly the airlines' fault. What I dont understand is why they don't use wide-body planes more. I mean, I know the standard explanation: they use too much fuel on short-hauls. But why can't the manufacturer solve this problem, either by reducing the wing size or changing the shape, to have a wide-body, short-to-medium haul aircraft? Aviation continues to grow, so while I understand the removal of hub-and-spoke, to the distributed pattern, it seems like if there's enough customer demand to run N 737's/A320's per day from SFO to, say, DEN, why not run 0.6*N 777's instead. Or what if southwest slowly replaced their '37 fleet with "short range 777s" ? Or, more specificially, why don't they enact regulations at some of our busiest airports and say "Sorry, but at peak hours at JFK, you can only arrive/depart wide-body aircraft". Half the planes that run SFO are these tiny skywest embraer and bombardier jets. During peak times, restricting their use and requiring at least a '37 or a320 could boost capacity significantly (+100 people per takeoff/landing)
- deepsun 8y ago
  > why don't they enact regulations Not sure who are "they". FAA only cares about safety. Airport cares about profits. If tiny planes pay the same fee as large ones, why nerf them?
  - JudgeWapner 8y ago
    > FAA only cares about safety not true. Try flying a cessna into JFK. Apparently ATC just circle you over the atlantic until they "find time to fit you in". private pilot paid his taxes and "has every right to use the facility", but if you actually try it, you'll have a bad time.
- alteria 8y ago
  >Why don't they use wide-body planes more Off the top of my mind, there are some other non-fuel factors 1- A competitive schedule in a business market includes offering a high number of frequencies, so running several flights on a narrowbody is preferred over a widebody 2- Building off of the above, you can segment your customers better, charging more for business-friendly timing 3- You mention seeing the tiny Skywest regional jets at SFO. While I'm not too familiar with United's route structure, I'd guess that most of these routes may not support a narrowbody (either because of mainline costs or demand) 4- Delta apparently used to run tiny regional jets out of JFK when Jet Blue was starting up in order to squat on slots, but also disrupt operations, since Delta would be much less impacted than Jet Blue.
longcommonname 8y ago
Out of all the scheduling problems the author could have talked about: min connect time, early departures, interline agreements, incidental stops. This has to be one of the more reasonable ones. Many of the above hint at problems that provide uncertainty and doubt into Travelor itineraries but the discussed topic literally provides more certainty and assists with ensuring less missed connections. There are some routes and airports that outside of expensive infrastructure cannot handle much more traffic. If you find out you made unreasonable promises you make them reasonable or try and make them possible.
myrandomcomment 8y ago
So this is possible. I fly on JAL all the time for work (internationally). They are pretty much always right on time for all schedule flights. They do things very differently then the US airlines I fly on. They make announcements about boarding time, status etc. more often. They announcements include things like walking time to the gate. There are way more people at the gate organizing the boarding queue and handling the ticket and passport checking then I have seen at other airlines. They have clear signage about which line is for what and walk around with the signs to make sure everyone understands. When you board the aircraft the crew is actively involved in making sure you are able to get in your seat and get your bags put away. If you have a connecting flight with a tight window there are personal at the plane exit waiting for you to help you make the next flight. I have always been impressed by their level of service and detail. I recently had a flight through Tokyo back to the US. As I walk off the plane that just landed and look out the window I can see my bag already off the plane and being put on a cart for transfer. I had a 40 minute window on an international connecting flight through Narita. I would never ever try to schedule that on another airline. I made it with 20 minutes to spare and my bag showed up at my destination just fine. Oh the other amazing thing is that priority tag on your bag for their frequent flyers for making your bag come out first really works, even when landing in SFO or LAX. I really feel this is a matter of organizational skill and planning. The US airlines just do not care to put in the effort. https://www.jal.co.jp/en/info/flightstats.html https://www.jal.co.jp/en/info/flightstats.html
linuxhansl 8y ago
Finally an explanation. I have been wondering about this. In my nativity I had always assumed that airline do this to reduce fuel consumption by flying more slowly and hence reducing drag. :)
ohazi 8y ago
United has a route where the return leg is so short that they make you sit in the plane for an extra hour after you land. The issue is that they're required to take off from Ben Gurion airport before a certain hour to meet the nighttime curfew / noise abatement requirements. But that has the flight landing in SFO an hour before the customs and immigration desks open, and they're not allowed to open the doors until then. Wish there was a way to make this particular flight a little longer...
tomohawk 8y ago
This article leaves out air traffic control, which is a major issue. In the US, ATC is a very manual process, and planes get slotted into routes that are more a factor of what the ATC personnel can deal with than anything else. In most cases, aircraft get lined up in the sky in lanes. If your plane is nice and new and can move efficiently at a higher speed, it doesn't matter because it will get stuck behind an old crappy plane that cannot.
gomijacogeo 8y ago
This is an idiotic article. First, to suggest that padding comes at the expense of operational improvement is wrong; well-applied padding is operational improvement. Second, some of those time losses are due to the move from turbojets (which are fast, screamingly loud, and inefficient) to high-bypass turbofans (which are slower, quieter, and much more fuel efficient). More time is lost as planes usually have to fly complex noise-abatement profiles and navigate more crowded and complex airspaces before they get to cruise.

186 points by quickthrower2 8y ago

The title is misleading, it should be: "Why airlines are allocating and publishing longer flight times than are actually needed to fly a certain distance"

heyoni 8y ago
You saved me a click. Thank you!
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
And the answer: Because 40% of flights used to be late, now it's only 15%, reducing the amount of compensation airlines have to pay out. Moving the goalposts. The article tries to make it look like a bad thing, like they're skirting their responsibilities (avoiding payouts), not improving their efficiency and punctuality (which is down to late passengers, which they either have to wait for or have to remove their luggage for, OR other factors outside the airlines' control), and that it's bad for the environment. But what if, and this may sound totally wild here, what if the schedules were too tight to begin with and they've just been adjusted to compensate? I mean yes, the article makes mention that thanks to padding, a lot of flights seem to arrive early. But is that a bad thing? It means there's a lot more space to play around in. And planes can fly a bit slower, or fly at whatever speed they are most efficient at, instead of having to rush.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  > reducing the amount of compensation airlines have to pay out. To be fair though, the point of the compensation is because a delayed flight is _very_ inconvenient. If they're removing that inconvenience by landing at the time they said they would so you can make your plans, then that's completely fine.
- gruez 8y ago
  >But what if, and this may sound totally wild here, what if the schedules were too tight to begin with and they've just been adjusted to compensate? In a perfect world this would be solved by having a 90/95/99% percentile arrvial window rather than an arrival time.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    You can often get that data if it really matters to you (flightstats sells it, for example), but I’m not sure I want to be running an MCMC analysis every time I book a ticket.
- mikestew 8y ago
  Moving the goalposts. Or perhaps more properly, re-setting expectations. If you can’t stick to your own schedule, give me one you can stick to. I’m of course reiterating what you already said (“adjusted to compensate”), but from a customer POV I’m going to be less upset if I’m early than if I’m late.

wastedhours 8y ago

Obviously we need to hold airlines to account to improve their environmental impacts, but I appreciate padding. I know I'm getting fooled, but if it makes sharing ETAs and making peace with a journey, I'd much rather it than be delayed continually. I think most of us can appreciate the logistical challenges keeping increasingly busy airports running on time, and whilst we need to ensure operational improvements are being made I don't think airlines are deliberately ignoring this (in an age of squeezed profits, being more efficient is the only way to go for them). Padding just makes sense.

yiyus 8y ago
Exactly my feelings. I agree efficiency should be improved, and I would like that total travel time got shorter, but I can accept a small margin to help them adjust if that will give me a consistent arriving time.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Exactly; if it was about operational efficiency, then airlines would be able to reduce padding to a minimum, which in turn would allow them to have planes ready to depart much quicker, which will allow them to fly more and thus make more money. I don't get the angle that it's the airlines that don't want to improve their efficiency.
mannykannot 8y ago
We are not even being fooled. The claim that someone is being fooled when a flight follows its published schedule is nonsense. It is also nonsense to suggest that this somehow removes incentives for airlines to be more efficient, as inefficiency has its costs. The whole article has the petulant tone of someone having a hissy fit over not getting everything he would like.

golemotron 8y ago

I've read that the reason why flights have gotten longer is fuel efficiency. Flying slower saves fuel. This was a strategy adopted when fuel prices spiked years ago and it was kept in place because of cost competition.

dingaling 8y ago
You shouldn't be downvoted, average cruise speeds now are less than in the 1980s and considerably less than in the 1960s. And modern short / medium haul airliners are designed for lowet cruising speeds. Ryanair notoriously uses a very aggressive Cost Index for flight planning which favours absolute economy over speed, to the extent that sometimes ATC complains about their low cruising speed More about CI: https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Cost_Index https://www.skybrary.aero/index.php/Cost_Index

tyingq 8y ago

Hard to reconcile the title with this observation: "Part of the problem is schedules are designed by airlines for perfect conditions". There's a lot of available info for US flight delays at bts.gov One good example: https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/understanding-reporting-causes-flight-delays-and-cancellations https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/understandi...

S_A_P 8y ago

I dont think this article is completely correct, and I dont see padding as a "trick". If the arrival window is more accurate by adding padding to the flight time, then I can plan more effectively when I get to my destination. Aren't airliners also flying slightly slower than they used to in an effort to save fuel(and lower emissions)?

cletus 8y ago

The "What airlines don't want you to know" tone of this post is misplaced and misguided. I also question the suggestions that longer published flight times mean more CO2 and there's no incentive for airlines to become more efficient. Here the airlines are doing pretty much exactly what I, as a passenger, want, which is to predictably arrive at an airport by a certain time more often. If a plane takes less time to fly somewhere some of the time because of weather, timely takeoff from departure airport, landing slot availability at the arrival airport or whatever, I don't really care. If they arrive late however, that can be a huge problem, particularly for making connections. As for CO2, the plane flying slower is more fuel-efficient. Isn't this lower CO2 emissions? 40 years ago there were so many fewer planes in the skies. You could fly as fast as you want, take off when you want (pretty much) and land when you want. Well, lack of satellite navigation and tracking mattered but basically the skies were less crowded. Just the other day I flew out of NYC and it took us 40+ minutes of being in a queue to take off behind 15-20 other planes because reasons. You have to have that padding in your schedule.

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sjg007 8y ago
NYC has always been subject to long delays... it’s a major pita.
netsharc 8y ago
> As for CO2 [...] 40+ minutes of being in a queue to take off Guess what the engines are doing at this time. Even worse if they tell planes to circle before landing because there are too many landings at this time.
- jak92 8y ago
  > Guess what the engines are doing at this time. Usually one engine is turned off...
  - dx034 8y ago

lozenge 8y ago

I didn't understand how this is wasting fuel. Does ATC make them fly slower rather than landing early?

aflag 8y ago
Flying slower may actually reduce on emissions.
Harvey-Specter 8y ago
Theoretically a plane may have to sit in a holding pattern if it arrives too early, either due to congestion at the airport or not having a landing slot.
kalleboo 8y ago
The "wasting fuel" part is some submarine by Baiada that the BBC fell for

harperlee 8y ago

Is it really true that when flying at less speed you burn more fuel? If air resistance grows quadratically with speed, I would assume that it is not, but there might be another effects on wing efficiency that I ignore...

danaliv 8y ago
The drag/speed curve of an airplane is actually U-shaped. Parasitic drag does increase with speed, but induced drag—the drag that results from the production of lift—is highest at slow speeds. The combination of these two curves is a U. The bottom of the drag curve is the speed at which the airplane will achieve maximum range for a given quantity of fuel; 76% of that speed will achieve maximum endurance. The distinction between range and endurance is that of distance versus time. Max range will get the most distance out of one pound of fuel, while max endurance gets you the most time out of that pound of fuel.
privateSFacct 8y ago
Flying faster uses LOTS more fuel per mile travelled. It's not just the aero but also what engines are optimized for
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AFascistWorld 8y ago
Then Concord wouldn't be dead.
sbradford26 8y ago
Here is a pretty good article explaining the optimization between range and speed. http://code7700.com/aero_range_performance.htm http://code7700.com/aero_range_performance.htm

learnstats2 8y ago

I believe wind speed and direction has a significant effect on flight times - making them inherently unpredictable and risking knock-on effects.

xchip 8y ago

TL;DR: 1) planes fly at a lower speed to save fuel 2) help airlines to claim they have improved on-time (OT) flight performance 3) it makes it easier to swerve the “magical three-hour limit” on delays – the threshold that qualifies passengers to file compensation claims at least under European Union passenger rights’ law.

mattkrause 8y ago
#3 is a little annoying, especially when the airline is uncommunicative. It’s natural to assume that an N hour departure delay will cause you to arrive N hours late, and that your connections or other plans will be thrown off accordingly. However, that’s not often true—-schedule padding and changes in flight plans[0] often make up for some of the difference, though they often don’t tell you this until you’re in the air. It would be great if more gate agents could give you an expected departure AND arrival time during delays. [0] I would not be surprised at all if the airlines explicitly trade off fuel costs vs. the costs of compensation. In other words, if you’re already late, don’t waste fuel try to make up all of the lost time, but use just enough to avoid a compensation-triggering delay.

aaron695 8y ago

> Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 Where's this garbage, which is repeated multiple times, coming from? They say padding is just scheduling. The planes are not flying further according to the article. Why would an airline burn extra fuel because they are ahead of time? Also if behind in time they have to burn extra fuel to catch up. So if anything they are burning less by having buffers. Typically shitty BBC. So they might circle if there are fees for being early at the destination which are more than fuel, I would not think so, but if true THAT would be interesting. But they can just go slower on the way if informed of this, which should be more fuel efficient, but if this is not true this also would be interesting but I find unlikely.

rob74 8y ago

This is actually what any other mode of transportation that uses a schedule has to do: if you have a schedule, you have to take some precautions to ensure you can keep to the schedule most of the time, otherwise you can forget about the schedule. Here in Germany, this is very obvious for bus lines on streets that are usually very busy - they have so much "padding" in their schedule that on less busy days the buses have to travel at 30 km/h instead of 50 km/h to avoid running ahead of schedule.

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Harvey-Specter 8y ago
Here in Canada I've had to sit and wait on the bus while the drive goes into Tim Horton's (coffee shop) because the bus is ahead of schedule.

Someone1234 8y ago

This is a surprisingly poor article from the BBC. So, padding, according to this article has a negative environmental impact. But that argument isn't justified and doesn't make sense, most time lost is either unavoidable for the airline (e.g. airport problems/weather) or at a phase of travel without the engines running (boarding delays, waiting for a gate, etc). Flying slower is actually a environmental win since aircraft are more efficient at slower speeds (although costs more to the airline due to staffing/opportunity cost). They seem to want us to believe that if padding was removed, and airlines magically got more efficient, that they'd use less fuel but what is the mechanism? What phase of flight sees the fuel reductions? It is like they don't know that aircraft often use either ground-power or only the generator while waiting. In fact the core premise of the article is clickbait. Oh no, airlines are making sure you can plan your travel times accurately by accounting for common delays within a route! The horror! Sorry, but not biting today.

Klathmon 8y ago
>Flying slower is actually a environmental win since aircraft are more efficient at slower speeds Do you have any more information on this? Obviously slower-speed turboprop planes are much more efficient than jet powered planes, but I've read in the past that flying a jet engine slower can actually increase fuel consumption and increase emissions.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  There is an efficiency curve for jet transports. There is a defined MRC (max range cruise, which varies by weight) and a calculated LRC (long range cruise, typically defined as 1% less fuel efficient [in kg/nm], which gives 99% of efficiency and about 104% of cruise speed vs MRC). Modern flight management systems have economy calculators that can predict not only fuel-at-destination figures, but can incorporate winds and other airline cost indices (crew, maint reserves, etc) to emit an "ECON" speed target. It is only speeds below the MRC that cause a decrease in (still-air) fuel efficiency. Airlines do not typically operate in that speed range in cruise absent an ATC directive to slow down to avoid holding ahead. (Obviously, flying a hold is done below MRC as well.)
- 8y ago

ensiferum 8y ago

"Increasing success by lowering expectations" ;-)

jillesvangurp 8y ago

A simple fix to incentivize more fuel economy is to stop excluding it from fuel taxation, as is still the case in a lot of places. E.g. most EU countries tax fuel for cars, quite heavily, but not for planes. This exemption is starting to look pretty backwards and there is a fair bit of lobbying going on by aviation companies to prevent this from happening. Low fuel prices currently allow planes to compete with trains for domestic flights in Germany even when the time gained is dubious at best. E.g. Berlin to Munich is a 50-60 minute flight and a 4 hour train journey. However, the train has no checkin and boarding queues and gets you from the downtown area of Berlin to the downtown area of Munich instead two 30-40 minute taxi rides away. If you factor that in, the train starts looking pretty damn good. Flying is still a little faster but so much less convenient. It might also inform their choices for looking more fuel efficient alternatives. E.g. Berlin-Munich is well in range of the several electrical planes currently under development. IMHO a fleet of hundreds of these could revolutionize domestic flights by allowing cheap, clean flights directly between small city airports that are currently impossible to fly to because of noise and runway length.

MagnumOpus 8y ago
> stop excluding it from fuel taxation Problem for this is that it needs coordination at least on a continent-spanning scale. If the UK decides to tax av fuel but any one of the Netherlands or France or Germany don't, Heathrow stops being a hub airport pretty damn quick, hurting both the economy and the flight options of southern England. Just like with corporate taxes, countries have an incentive for a race to the bottom, so coordinated action is needed.
- gruez 8y ago
  >Problem for this is that it needs coordination at least on a continent-spanning scale Sounds like a job for EU and/or the US federal government.
burfog 8y ago
This is dangerous and would increase fuel usage. If the EU taxed jet fuel, airlines would then do several things: 1. They would load up with maximum fuel for inbound flights. Carrying all this extra fuel means they need to burn a bit more fuel for the inbound flight. 2. They would skimp on fuel for outbound flights. This produces a risk of a low-fuel emergency. 3. Many outbound flights would stop just outside the EU for fuel. The additional stop would burn more fuel. Norway, Iceland, Russia, Switzerland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Turkey would all become busy refueling stops.

andyst 8y ago

The article confuses the differing responsibilities of airlines, airports and air services (ATC) who then work together to deliver a realistic schedule. Airlines are motivated to maximise fleet utilisation so the narrow focus on padding is a misleading and overemphasised element to judge the intent of this specific delay mitigation. The industry is moving towards increasing collaboration, the article I think avoids mentioning the IATA recommended ACDM approach instead pitching a companies PoC from one of their sources.

objektif 8y ago

No kidding, an internatial route I take was 8.5 hours 8 years ago and now it is 11.5. I am not sure this is a result of padding or scheduling.

MatthewWilkes 8y ago

The JAL flights from London to Tokyo and back really annoyed me last year because of padding. The LHR to HND leg arrived 45 minutes early, which meant I had 45 minutes extra of early morning time in Tokyo and 45 minutes less snoozing to try and get ahead of the jetlag. The return trip was different, if the plane had departed on time it would have reached London at a time when inbound flights are not allowed due to noise restrictions. That meant it was about 2am by the time I was able to board the plane, again not ideal for sleeping.

bubbabojangles 8y ago

The hub and spoke system also contributes to the congestion we see at the airports. A distributed system would be more tolerant to issues like weather, and you can afford to pad flight schedules with little impact on congestion due to the fewer throughput of planes at any one airport. This of course may not make financial sense for the Airline to distribute their operations, would need to be regulated.

lostapathy 8y ago
We're already starting to see that change. As traffic has grown airlines have added more point-to-point flights that skip the hubs. Newer aircraft have also changed the economics of those route changes well and enabled more point-to-point flights that weren't previously economical.

Proven 8y ago

Tl;dr In order to deal with BS government regulations purportedly made to benefit passengers, airlines made flights slower and passengers suffer on every flight (and can't get comp'd for the time lost thanks to this government BS).

danielfoster 8y ago

This article is informative but poorly thought out. Most delays are out of the airlines’ control and generally involve congestion. Unlike 50 years ago when there was little air traffic and airlines could pick the most direct route, today that is no longer the case. Flights are indeed longer because flying the most direct route or the route with the best tailwinds is no longer possible. I’m surprised BBC didn’t do more fact checking.

el_cujo 8y ago

This really sounds like a non-issue. As a consumer, I'd much rather have them over estimate the flight schedule and arrive early than the reverse. I live near a smaller regional airport and end up having layovers basically anytime I fly anywhere more than 200 miles away, so I always relax a little easier when I pilot tells me we're landing ahead of schedule on my first leg so I know I wont miss my connection. As for carbon emissions, I'm guessing that whatever padded on time is spent at the gate isn't really an issue, it's more about drawn out approaches when landing. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that something like this happens when you have so many planes entering and leaving an airport, it's amazing to me that things go as smoothly as they do. Plane travel isn't going anywhere and it seems a little absurd to me that flight time needs to be completely min-maxed down to the minute due to carbon emissions, there are definitely easier and more effective ways to control this.

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beager 8y ago

In my experience, fixing ground ops would be the biggest boon to efficiency and customer satisfaction. My experience these days from doing a lot of domestic flying in the U.S. is that lack of ground coordination (takeoff queues, gate availability, randomly sitting on the tarmac for an hour) cost a lot of money and time. If the state of planes in the sky can actively be used to optimize ground ops at airports, I think that'd help consumers and reduce some costs. Other than that, I think consumers could forgive the padding in flight times. If I take off 20 minutes late and still arrive 10 minutes early, I'm happy, so the psychology continues to work.

idlewords 8y ago

Beyond the considerations in this article, I've always found it fascinating that none of the big jets flying today is as fast in routine operation as the first American airliner, the 707. The difference is small, and the reason is partly to do with fuel economy, but it's a very good example of how technology doesn't always go forward in the expected direction. A similar analogy in computerland is how many of us are doing most of our computing on devices much less powerful than the ones we had ten years ago, a function of switching to mobile devices and high-overhead virtualized computing.

LoSboccacc 8y ago
also capacity. larger plane need larger wing that enter into transonic regime earlier than smaller wing. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-rule/transonic-drag.jpg http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-rule/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag-divergence_Mach_number you want to be below or above transonic, and above transonic is banned pretty much anywhere.

ekianjo 8y ago

> However, this global trend poses multiple problems: not only does your journey take longer but creating the illusion of punctuality means there’s no pressure on airlines to become more efficient, meaning congestion and carbon emissions will keep rising. Am I missing something? It's not like flights are spending more time in the air compared to before - it's just that you wait longer and your flight leaves late vs schedule. So how does that increase carbon emissions?

alexhutcheson 8y ago

TL;DR: Airlines used to set SLOs that they couldn't hit consistently. They updated the SLOs based on actual performance, and now they hit them much more consistently. Article author seems to believe the pointy-haired boss idea that if they went back to the original (over-optimistic) SLOs then the airlines would somehow increase performance to hit them.

kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago

HN can be funny. Since this is an article about the airline industry, a lot of people here are criticizing them for setting lower expectations and padding times. And this is an industry that deals with so many environmental, regulatory, administrative and personnel problems completely out of their control. On the other hand, if it's an article about how "PMs ruin software engineering by pushing for unrealistic deadlines", all of a sudden a job role that depends largely on just people and their (fairly reliable) computers justifies 2x or 3x the time estimates.

deepsun 8y ago

Why don't they just arrive early most of the time? For passengers, being early is as good as "A0".

kenneth 8y ago

Huh? This article is ridiculous. > 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. So… let me get this right… because the announced scheduled arrival time is announced as being an hour later than usual… somehow the plane spends more time in the air and is worse for the environment… I think the author missed their morning cup of coffee. > Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise and CO2 Again, with the unsubstantiated and ludicrous claim that an airline giving itself room on the schedule for operational issues not to cause cascading effects somehow means more time in the air, more noise, and more emissions. I give up. I hope nobody takes this article seriously.

AWildC182 8y ago
Ok, I'm not the only one. For the most part the gate-to-gate timeline is extremely predictable. They already have the clearances set up and know what route they're flying so the flying bit is not really going to change much outside of unforeseen weather or traffic delays. The variable part is loading, unloading, and staffing issues (someone didn't make it to work) and occasionally absorbing the impact of flight delays. I suspect the net effect is actually a decrease in CO2 emission because the delay stack at the end of the day doesn't force pilots to bump the throttles a little to cut some time on flights with lots of connections as I've seen them do before.

dreamcompiler 8y ago

This article reads like a not-very-well-disguised ad for the methodology that Baiada is selling.

eqdw 8y ago

Problem: "Planes are consistently later than our stated arrival times" Solution: "Why don't we give more accurate arrival times, so passengers can be more confident in those stated arrival times and minimize disruption to their travel plans" The Guardian: "This is bad for the environment" Literally the article is saying that when airlines stopped optimistically lying about arrival time, this somehow poisoned the planet. Despite the fact that both before and after the change being complained about, flights took off at the same real timestamp, spent the same amount of real time in the air, and landed at the same real timestamp.

JudgeWapner 8y ago

I think the fallacy here is that they can just push back from the gate, trot directly to the runway and takeoff. In any major airport, that's a crapshoot. I've been spending a lot of time watching ground ops from http://www.airportviewer.com/airport/KSFO http://www.airportviewer.com/airport/KSFO (courtesy of HN, posted a few months ago). There are times when the planes pile up 14 deep. I saw JFK up to 20 planes on the ground waiting. This is hardly the airlines' fault. What I dont understand is why they don't use wide-body planes more. I mean, I know the standard explanation: they use too much fuel on short-hauls. But why can't the manufacturer solve this problem, either by reducing the wing size or changing the shape, to have a wide-body, short-to-medium haul aircraft? Aviation continues to grow, so while I understand the removal of hub-and-spoke, to the distributed pattern, it seems like if there's enough customer demand to run N 737's/A320's per day from SFO to, say, DEN, why not run 0.6*N 777's instead. Or what if southwest slowly replaced their '37 fleet with "short range 777s" ? Or, more specificially, why don't they enact regulations at some of our busiest airports and say "Sorry, but at peak hours at JFK, you can only arrive/depart wide-body aircraft". Half the planes that run SFO are these tiny skywest embraer and bombardier jets. During peak times, restricting their use and requiring at least a '37 or a320 could boost capacity significantly (+100 people per takeoff/landing)

deepsun 8y ago
> why don't they enact regulations Not sure who are "they". FAA only cares about safety. Airport cares about profits. If tiny planes pay the same fee as large ones, why nerf them?
- JudgeWapner 8y ago
  > FAA only cares about safety not true. Try flying a cessna into JFK. Apparently ATC just circle you over the atlantic until they "find time to fit you in". private pilot paid his taxes and "has every right to use the facility", but if you actually try it, you'll have a bad time.
alteria 8y ago
>Why don't they use wide-body planes more Off the top of my mind, there are some other non-fuel factors 1- A competitive schedule in a business market includes offering a high number of frequencies, so running several flights on a narrowbody is preferred over a widebody 2- Building off of the above, you can segment your customers better, charging more for business-friendly timing 3- You mention seeing the tiny Skywest regional jets at SFO. While I'm not too familiar with United's route structure, I'd guess that most of these routes may not support a narrowbody (either because of mainline costs or demand) 4- Delta apparently used to run tiny regional jets out of JFK when Jet Blue was starting up in order to squat on slots, but also disrupt operations, since Delta would be much less impacted than Jet Blue.

longcommonname 8y ago

Out of all the scheduling problems the author could have talked about: min connect time, early departures, interline agreements, incidental stops. This has to be one of the more reasonable ones. Many of the above hint at problems that provide uncertainty and doubt into Travelor itineraries but the discussed topic literally provides more certainty and assists with ensuring less missed connections. There are some routes and airports that outside of expensive infrastructure cannot handle much more traffic. If you find out you made unreasonable promises you make them reasonable or try and make them possible.

myrandomcomment 8y ago

So this is possible. I fly on JAL all the time for work (internationally). They are pretty much always right on time for all schedule flights. They do things very differently then the US airlines I fly on. They make announcements about boarding time, status etc. more often. They announcements include things like walking time to the gate. There are way more people at the gate organizing the boarding queue and handling the ticket and passport checking then I have seen at other airlines. They have clear signage about which line is for what and walk around with the signs to make sure everyone understands. When you board the aircraft the crew is actively involved in making sure you are able to get in your seat and get your bags put away. If you have a connecting flight with a tight window there are personal at the plane exit waiting for you to help you make the next flight. I have always been impressed by their level of service and detail. I recently had a flight through Tokyo back to the US. As I walk off the plane that just landed and look out the window I can see my bag already off the plane and being put on a cart for transfer. I had a 40 minute window on an international connecting flight through Narita. I would never ever try to schedule that on another airline. I made it with 20 minutes to spare and my bag showed up at my destination just fine. Oh the other amazing thing is that priority tag on your bag for their frequent flyers for making your bag come out first really works, even when landing in SFO or LAX. I really feel this is a matter of organizational skill and planning. The US airlines just do not care to put in the effort. https://www.jal.co.jp/en/info/flightstats.html https://www.jal.co.jp/en/info/flightstats.html

linuxhansl 8y ago

Finally an explanation. I have been wondering about this. In my nativity I had always assumed that airline do this to reduce fuel consumption by flying more slowly and hence reducing drag. :)

ohazi 8y ago

United has a route where the return leg is so short that they make you sit in the plane for an extra hour after you land. The issue is that they're required to take off from Ben Gurion airport before a certain hour to meet the nighttime curfew / noise abatement requirements. But that has the flight landing in SFO an hour before the customs and immigration desks open, and they're not allowed to open the doors until then. Wish there was a way to make this particular flight a little longer...

tomohawk 8y ago

This article leaves out air traffic control, which is a major issue. In the US, ATC is a very manual process, and planes get slotted into routes that are more a factor of what the ATC personnel can deal with than anything else. In most cases, aircraft get lined up in the sky in lanes. If your plane is nice and new and can move efficiently at a higher speed, it doesn't matter because it will get stuck behind an old crappy plane that cannot.

gomijacogeo 8y ago

This is an idiotic article. First, to suggest that padding comes at the expense of operational improvement is wrong; well-applied padding is operational improvement. Second, some of those time losses are due to the move from turbojets (which are fast, screamingly loud, and inefficient) to high-bypass turbofans (which are slower, quieter, and much more fuel efficient). More time is lost as planes usually have to fly complex noise-abatement profiles and navigate more crowded and complex airspaces before they get to cruise.