While travelling through Canada a few weeks ago, I was ecstatic to find my flight from Toronto to Saskatoon had arrived 19 minutes early. Having got into the city a bit earlier than expected, I popped into the Remai Modern museum before it closed. A few days later, on the final leg of my jaunt from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, back to Newark Liberty International, via Toronto, the first leg was also 19 minutes early, and the second a whole 22 minutes ahead of schedule.
As happy as I was to get home nearly half an hour early, I realised that five of the six legs of my Air Canada flights had been early – and the one that wasn’t was just a minute late. Had I just been lucky to catch the swiftest of tailwinds as I jetted around…or are airlines actually overstating their flight times?
“Padding schedules is a common practice among air carriers,” Chad Kendall of Metropolitan State University of Denver’s Department of Aviation & Aerospace Science and a Federation Aviation Administration (FAA) chief instructor tells Condé Nast Traveller. He attributes it to the fact the networks and models that airlines use to predict flight times face unanticipated factors, such as weather, maintenance issues and air traffic control delays, which “affect the delicate schedule an airline is trying to operate.” The buffer is meant to allow day-to-day variation, and carriers are constantly reviewing and adjusting these times, so that “incremental increases in thsye scheduled flight times between airports are not uncommon,” he adds.
As a frequent traveller, FinanceBuzz’s Josh Koebert started to notice that flight times on his own flights were “creeping higher and higher in recent years.” So, he dove into the data, analysing millions of flight records to see if there was a trend. Sure enough, he found his hunch was right, “shocked at how bold airlines are getting when it comes to longer padding times.” He found that in 2012, the average flight had 8 minutes of padding, while in 2023, it is up to 11 minutes – a 27 per cent increase in a decade.
“Padding makes it seem like airlines are better at their jobs than they actually are, which benefits them when it comes to things like advertising and government reporting,” Koebert tells CNT. “It can paint a picture of competency and efficiency in the industry that isn’t actually true, keeping the eyes of regulators away.”
That, perhaps, is the greater concern. The FAA confirmed to our inquiry that their regulations “don’t address this issue,” while the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) defines on-time arrivals as being within 15 minutes of the published arrival time. The government agency publishes those stats monthly as part of its Air Travel Consumer Report, with the goal of incentivising airlines to set more realistic schedules.
That’s exactly what aroused Koebert’s suspicions. His initial research suggested that the practice started when Congress implemented the On-Time Disclosure Rule in 1987, requiring carriers to disclose their performance. “Research shows that in the first five years of this rule, airlines increased their scheduled flight times by 10 per cent, which increased their on-time arrival performance by 20 per cent in that time frame,” he says, noting his research showed that in the last 30 years, it’s “still getting worse.”
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