
Why airlines make flights longer on purpose - quickthrower2
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190405-the-secret-about-delays-airlines-dont-want-you-to-know
======
cletus
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.

~~~
mikeash
The idea that padded schedules leave airlines with no reason to be efficient
is idiotic. It’s a heavily capital-intensive industry with razor-thin margins
that has historically been a bad place to make money. There’s even a classic
joke about it: “How do you make a small fortune in the airlines? Start with a
large fortune.”

This is the industry that generated the famous story where American saved
$40,000/year by going from two olives to one in their in-flight salad. United
saved $300,000/year by printing their magazine on lighter paper. If you work
at an airline and find a way to shave off a dime in fuel costs per flight,
you’ll get articles written about you. And we’re supposed to believe that
these companies don’t care about wasting fuel now that their schedules are
padded out a bit?

~~~
ChicagoBoy11
The iead that airlines have no reason to be efficient in it of itself is
idiotic. It is an incredibly competitive industry, and the lengths to which
airlines go to explore every possible margin is enough testament of that.

To add to your list of examples. KLM, for instance, was one of the first to
introduce a system that would allow certain flight data to be uploaded into
the flight computer as opposed to be requiring the pilots to enter it by hand.
Other than fewer errors, they touted potentially saving pilots a couple
minutes of data entry as one of the chief gains of the system.

~~~
brlewis
I generally avoid the word "idiotic", but it fits here. Can we flag articles
for stupidity?

Article tl;dr -- Airlines used to get from airport to airport faster. Airlines
used to be late a lot of the time. Airlines increased their estimated flight
times in order to achieve higher on-time percentage. The reason they did this
instead of just being faster is that they love using more fuel.

I'm not anywhere near the airline industry myself. The next time I see
misreporting on my own company or industry I'll look back at this and remind
myself it could be worse.

~~~
sjg007
The increased the time so that they won’t be fined for not being on time.

------
Someone1234
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.

~~~
jillesvangurp
It's not just flying slower. If you've ever flown into London, you are
probably familiar with the notion of a holding pattern. When things get busy
at the airport, due to poor scheduling, it is quite common for planes to fly
in circles for 10-20 minutes or even longer in some cases.

Also, planes sitting on taxi lanes burning fuel with six planes in front of
them is a common issue. Planes are assigned landing and take off slots and if
they miss those, that's a problem.

So, if the schedule is unrealistic, planes might be taking off "on time"
knowing full well they'll be circling downtown London for some time.

~~~
robjan
It's not poor scheduling, so much as Heathrow being at 99.5% capacity which
means queuing is required so they can maintain one landing per minute.

~~~
CydeWeys
Yeah, the airport is at capacity. I'm not seeing how it has anything to do
with schedule padding at all. They're doing take-offs and landings there as
quickly as possible.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Airlines know before they take off their ETA to the other side pretty much
down to the minute. Their planning builds in padding so that they are
guaranteed to make it on time. Which means they expect to arrive early and end
up in a holding pattern because the take off slot and landing slot are
deliberately misaligned. This is exactly what the article is implying.

That's of course aside from the inevitable issues arising from operating at
99% capacity. Anyone familiar with queuing theory or logistics knows that this
just means things pile up at the cost of delays and extra fuel being burnt.
So, that too is poor planning. You never operate systems with queues at close
to 100% capacity unless you are looking for severe cost overruns and
bottlenecks.

This poor planning results from misaligned incentives. Airports can just park
planes in holding patterns for however long they desire. It's not their fuel
being burnt. So they over provision knowing full well they will have planes in
holding patterns throughout the day, This maximizes their revenue. So they are
actively incentivized to do this. Likewise, airlines buy fuel cheaply and only
get penalized for being late. So they are incentivized to implement padding.

So, the fix is re-aligning the incentives for airports and airlines to
minimize planes in holding patterns and fuel being burnt. There are several
ways to do this but the bottom line would be making sure both airlines and
airports aim to not have planes in holding patterns because that costs both of
them something.

------
ohadron
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"

~~~
Cthulhu_
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.

~~~
gruez
>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
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.

------
jillesvangurp
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
> 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
>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.

------
wastedhours
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.

~~~
mannykannot
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.

------
el_cujo
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.

------
S_A_P
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)?

------
rob74
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.

~~~
Harvey-Specter
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.

------
kenneth
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
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.

------
myrandomcomment
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)

------
beager
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.

------
eqdw
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.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
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.

------
MatthewWilkes
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.

------
gomijacogeo
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.

------
ohazi
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...

------
JudgeWapner
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)

~~~
alteria
>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.

~~~
JudgeWapner
I think #2 is the strongest case. Wendover Productions talked about that a
lot, how you can have 6 different prices for the same flight. #4 is terrible,
that's not competition, its warfare. Again Wendover talked about something
similar. Icelandair tried going to Dallas, so American immediately began a
Dallas route to make their competitor suffer. That may technically be
"competition", but the spirit of it is malicious.

I think we should revert to the hub and spoke system. Have huge jets that do
nothing but travel between hubs all day. Let the business people have their
half, and let the cattle buy essentially last-minute bus-tickets to traverse
the country. Then book your ticket from the hub to home. Even though that's
inefficient compared to direct routing, a 2 or 3 hour ground delay costs the
same (in time) as going from CHI->LAX and then backtracking to phoenix or
vegas to your final destination.

Another thing I think could work would be "JIT" routing. where you dont even
know where your connections will be, until the day you fly. then you could
have sudden, "ad-hoc hubs" that suit that particular day's distribution of
travelers. Each morning a huge rack of computers could solve that day's
"travelling-salesman problem" of weather, demand, location of aircraft, etc
and come up with an optimal solution. people wouldn't like this at first,
becuase of fear of the unknown, but I suspect it would lead to monumental
increases in efficiency.

~~~
T-hawk
How do you propose to have crew available for every possible permutation of
that routing? It would take an enormous standing population at every airport
in the system, only a small portion of which will work on each given day. Good
luck finding employees to take on that arrangement. Routing is about
scheduling more than just aircraft.

~~~
JudgeWapner
The crew would be probably the easiest parameter to optimize because they
don't have a choice. Let's say the current configuration has a set of crew in
PHX and on wednesdays they normally go to denver, 2 hrs away. with a dynamic
configuration, they can expect to go on any 2 hour flight or less. the only
commitment to the crew is that they are to be returned to their home city on
their first day off. If they have enough seniority, then they can be put on
the top list of employees to draw from to go to DEN if thats what they want. I
don't see the problem. The crew could be routed just as dynamically as the
PAX.

------
idlewords
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
also capacity. larger plane need larger wing that enter into transonic regime
earlier than smaller wing.

[http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-
rule/...](http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/aerodynamics/area-
rule/transonic-drag.jpg)

[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.

------
harperlee
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
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.

------
longcommonname
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.

------
andyst
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.

------
ekianjo
> 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?

------
tyingq
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/understandi...](https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-
airports/understanding-reporting-causes-flight-delays-and-cancellations)

------
tomohawk
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.

------
bubbabojangles
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
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.

------
danielfoster
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.

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

~~~
Harvey-Specter
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.

------
golemotron
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
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)

------
linuxhansl
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. :)

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ensiferum
"Increasing success by lowering expectations" ;-)

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xchip
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.

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mattkrause
#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.

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learnstats2
I believe wind speed and direction has a significant effect on flight times -
making them inherently unpredictable and risking knock-on effects.

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objektif
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.

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

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

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alexhutcheson
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.

