It's Not Your Imagination. Airlines Are Padding Flight Times | Hacker News Reader

It's Not Your Imagination. Airlines Are Padding Flight Times

nytimes.com

13 pointsmikhael18 comments

Putting aside the increased delays, the padding on its own is good for us, right? Having a more conservative estimate makes planning easier, especially when connecting flights.

I don't like it when the plane arrives 30 minutes - 1 hour early (has happened to me on long flights, I guess due to favorable wind + padding), and they brag about being the most "on time" airline or something like that. While better than 1 hour late, 1 hour early isn't on time either, I expected to get an extra hour of sleep.

Their slack is your constraint. Classic zero-sum adversarial game.

The padding makes it easier for an average person to not miss flights. But it makes it harder for a smart person to schedule optimally, since now the data they have includes an unknown fudge factor.

Imagine if gas stations showed the true price of their gas plus a few cents. You’d be pleasantly surprised when they charged you $1.97/gal instead of $2.00, but your ability to budget precisely would be adversely affected.

> it makes it harder for a smart person to schedule optimally, since now the data they have includes an unknown fudge factor.

The fudge factor always existed, it is now the airline's job rather than mine.

They have an incentive to pick a good-enough one, while adjusting it daily/weekly while I tend to fly once every couple of months and that too to a completely new airport most of the time.

If you do the fudging right and leave enough padding, it makes everyone happy - if you pad too much, you lose business as several normally possible connections become impossible by the published schedule.

Indigo did this in India a few years ago and the flights were 30-45 minutes longer on paper (like a 90 minute flight marked as 120), but because of their on-time reputation they got a lot of business customers who take multiple flights a day over other airlines.

On the other hand, failure to budget flight time properly has larger consequences than fuel budgeting: missed connections, stranded passengers, passengers needing to purchase replacement tickets on different airlines at spot rates, etc. Accounting for the natural variance in flight times minimizes the costs of these inconveniences, presumably lowering costs to airlines and increasing satisfaction of most travellers.

For myself, almost all of my connections are not within driving distance, and my schedule is usually unforgiving to overnight delays. I usually budget 2.5 h minimum for transfers, 3.5 minimum if entering the US because passport control has its own very large variance. Haven't had the inconvenience of a missed connection in the last 10 trips.

You’d almost always rather arrive early than late. Padding helps you catch your connection, get to the rental car counter before they close, meet your ride etc.

https://archive.is/rPyUg

Are the times actually being padded or are more flights on time now because the new times estimated for various sub-tasks reflect increased paperwork requirements and whatnot that are easy to pencil whip in the event of urgency?

It's real easy to run around checking whatever you're tasked with checking and if the results are actually good enter realistic results into a company tablet later when you have a couple minutes of downtime after the plane has left your area of responsibility. You see this sort of behavior in all sort of comparable industries where increased technology has caused spot checking and audits to be replaced with data entry. This would also explain the increase in the times allotted for all sorts of non-flight overhead tasks.

I wonder how much of this padding is for the next flight and due to all the other services needing to get a plane going like luggage, food services, fueling, deicing etc. The past two years have been a mess, but it doesn't always seem to be the flight crew or the plane itself. I've been on dirty planes, stuck at the gate due to no one to clear us from the gate. So much more outside of the airlines direct control is a mess too.

Is this a bad thing, really? I’d much rather prepare for the worst case and be pleasantly surprised to be a bit early.

Is this why flight prices are skyrocketing too?

Why would these be related?

There are only 24 hours in a day, so I assume it means less flights?

That'd only be the case if airlines pad beyond the turnaround time or actually use the padded numbers for operations.

Covid layoffs decimated the industry and it will take a decade before efficiencies recalibrate.

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Use archive.today to bypass the paywalls. A kind soul usually posts the archive link in the comments pretty quickly here, in this case seatac76.

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