How do the airlines make it look like they are on time?

To make people believe that they are punctual, airlines voluntarily lengthen the duration of flights.

Some of our readers have asked us why, on a given route, some airlines take less time than others or are systematically late or early.

No airline flies faster than another

Is it because their planes go faster? Except to oppose a propeller turbojet and a twin-engine jet on short/medium haul it is totally negligible. (We forget of course the time of the late Concorde).

Do any have less optimized routes? This may have been the case in the past when jets had to take less direct routes than quadjets in order to stay at a minimum distance from land in case of problems. With the generalization and progress of the ETOPS standard, which allows to certify twin-engine aircraft to fly further and further from the coast, this is less and less the case.

And airlines are not cabs either: they have nothing to gain by “walking around” the customer to make him pay more, on the contrary: the shorter it is the less fuel they use, the better it is for their profitability.

On the other hand, one thing is certain: too much delay is expensive, and this on two levels.

First of all, financially, with the compensation to be paid to passengers in case of delays, especially in Europe, not to mention missed connections.

Then, and this is not negligible either, in terms of reputation. Being at the top of the list of the least punctual airlines does not help to win customers.

So the airlines have learned to cheat on the duration of the flights.

How the duration of a flight is calculated

Before going any further, it is important to clarify what is meant by flight duration. Is it the time spent in flight? Time between takeoff and landing? No !

This is the time between the closing of the aircraft door at the departure airport and its opening at the arrival airport. All the time between these two moments is the flight time.

This is the reason why you will often hear a pilot announce a flight time of 1 hour when you have “bought” a flight of 1h30 because he announces you the actual flight time.

This time between the closing and opening of the doors is called “Block”.

Many things make the actual flight time different from the “block” time.

The time in flight is only a part of the flight time

First there is the taxi time between the gate and the runway. If you fly from Bordeaux we are talking about a few hundred meters to cover, from Roissy it’s miles. Having recently tested the new Istanbul airport, between the time to get around the gigantic terminal and the time to reach the runway, you’ll be there for a while. On a recent flight I took between Istanbul and Izmir, the block was 1h20 for a real flight time of about 40 minutes (360 km approximately).

This taxiing time does not only depend on the distance: there is the airport congestion. Driving a few kilometers to take off immediately is one thing, driving as much or even much less to be 10th in the queue at take-off is something else.

Taxi time and congestion also play their role at the arrival, adding in the wait before even reaching the runway. Depending on the number of aircraft waiting to land, you will have to turn around for more or less time before being allowed to land.

Without forgetting the factor related to the airport itself. Sometimes, due to the lack of available gate “on contact”, the planes have to be parked “remote” and the passengers have to be boarded and disembarked by bus. This takes time.

And who has never been in an aircraft that has arrived at the gate…and impossible to get off because there are no personnel to bring the gateway into contact with the aircraft…and thus open the gate.

In addition to all this, the climatic factor makes things more complex: in some airports subject to extreme weather conditions (snow, wind, storms) you may have to wait before taking off or landing.

Finally, it is said that in some countries, at some airports, air traffic control may tend to give priority to local airlines or to the one that has its hub at a given airport.

All these factors mean that adding taxi time to the actual flight time rarely reflects the time the passenger will spend between closing and opening the doors.

This distinction is a good thing for the passenger. What would we say if we were told that we were going to touch the runway at 1:00 p.m. when we arrive at the terminal at 1:15 or 20? It is the organization of a working day, a correspondence, a transfer that can be impacted.

So the airlines take this into account. A flight between Paris CDG and New York JFK (or vice versa) takes longer from door to door than a flight of the same distance between two less congested airports.

So the airlines have taken this factor into account to adapt their “block” according to the airports, the seasons etc.

Up to 35 minutes difference on the same route

Some examples:

Let’s start with a CDG-JFK: 15 min difference between the two extremes.

Notice the extreme precision of Delta which announces 8h23!

One could think that the Orly-JFK is a little shorter because Orly is less congested?

Well, no, quite the opposite.

London on the other hand is much more congested than Roissy.

The duration is shorter because the flight is shorter but we see the same “margins” and gaps.

Let’s look at a London-Chicago. Two very complicated airports.

Here we have a 35 minutes difference…. and it is the same airline, American Airlines, which is at both extremes. This must be due to the hours of affluence of one or the other of the airports.

On shorter flights like London-Istanbul

30 minutes d’écart entre Turkish Airlines et British Airways.

On the other hand, the departure from Frankfurt is equal

Punctuality: a biased notion

So don’t be surprised when your flight leaves late and arrives on time, the safety margins are taken, especially since the pilot can still gain time in flight or even be helped by the winds. And the longer the flight the more this is true. Leaving 30 minutes late and arriving 20 minutes early is not unknown to me.

It is therefore necessary to take the rankings on the punctuality of the airlines with a grain of salt and to put your own experiences into perspective: it is very often a question of wider or narrower safety margins and not of the real operational efficiency of the airlines.

This technique, although “neutral” for the passenger, is not without its limits. Over time the block has continued to increase, sometimes by an hour on a long haul. Why ? As air transport becomes more and more complex, airlines are suspected of putting everything on the block instead of trying to improve their ground operations and finally passing the pill of their own inefficiency to the passenger by inflating flight times.

Too much safety margin also hurts the business

But, on the other hand, what is stopping the airlines from inflating the flight times for even more safety and the illusion of punctuality?

The first reason is that it ends up being obvious. A Paris-New York in 10 hours would be suspicious.

The second is that booking systems tend to put the shortest flights (direct or connecting) first. So you have to make a good trade-off between protecting yourself on the one hand and not finding yourself at the bottom of the page after all the competitors.

Photo : timeliness by JMiks via Shutterstock