You’ll be flying and the pilot will make an in-flight announcement that goes something like, ““Folks, we’ve had some favorable winds so it looks like we will arrive 20 minutes earlier than our scheduled time, so we will be starting to make our descent now.” Everyone gets all happy that they are arriving early. But are you actually arriving early? A massive study spanning 26 years found that airline companies might be fibbing to you about the flight times to trick you into being happy about your earlier than scheduled arrival.
Researchers from Tufts University conducted a study where they examined Department of Transportation data of 160 million flights from 1990 to 2016. The researchers analyzed flight schedules and arrivals from year to year. They checked out the length of flights with the same route that were flown by the same airlines at the exact same time of the year. The study discovered that flight schedules in 2016 were eight minutes longer than they were in 1990. The study, which is titled “Do Airlines Pad Their Schedules,” discovered that schedule times have “increased in most years, with the largest increases occurring after 2008.”
“We find that actual flight times and total travel times have also increased over this period but by less than the increase in schedule times and with the gap growing over time,” the paper states. “This has resulted in reduced arrival delays despite the fact that flights are taking longer to complete.”
“Airlines are arriving earlier relative to their schedule so there are fewer delays, and we’re all happy about that, but if you look at how long it actually takes to complete the flight, it’s taking longer than it used to,” said Silke Forbes who is one of the paper’s authors. “So we’re spending more time in the air at the same time being told we’re arriving early.”
So by inflating the travel times, airlines are able to trick their customers into being happy by boasting that they are arriving early even though they are actually taking a longer flight than they did years ago.
[Inc]