Though airlines around the world would like travelers to believe their on-time records are improving, it turns out that may not exactly be the case.
Instead, airline are padding their flight times to reduce the number of late flights.
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The practice, known as “schedule creep,” was the focus of a recent study published by Singapore Management University.
The study is based on a random sampling of airlines’ schedules between 1986 and 2016 for heavily traveled non-stop routes.
Researchers found that even after accounting for the effects of such things as air traffic growth, airport-specific congestion, and other airport-specific anomalies, the scheduled block times of flights has grown between 6.2 and 9.8 minutes per flight since 1986.
A “block time” is the amount of time that elapses between when an airplane leaves its departure gate to when it parks at its arrival gate.
“With airlines deploying ever more advanced aircraft, anecdotal evidence suggests, ironically, that over the years, the amount of time between the scheduled departure and arrival times…the scheduled block times, for a number of non-stop airport pairs, has actually increased,” states the report.
Flights between Los Angeles International (LAX) and San Francisco International (SFO) for instance have extended from a block time of 90 minutes in 1996 to anywhere from 91 to 110 minutes, the report explains.
While this may seem like no big deal, as a recent BBC report on the topic notes, “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.”
Even with the schedule creep or padding more than 30 percent of all flights arrive more than 15 minutes late, Captain Michael Baiada, president of aviation consultancy ATH Group, told BBC.
Notably, that figure used to be 40 percent, according to the US Department of Transportation’s Air Travel Consumer Report, but padding, not operational improvements, improved on-time arrival rates, Baiada told BBC.
“By padding, airlines are gaming the system to fool you,” he said.
Instead, airlines should be improving operational issues, which would directly benefit customers, Baiada added.
“Padding drives higher costs in fuel burn, noise, and CO2 which means if airline efficiency goes up, costs go down, benefitting both the environment and fares,” said Baiada.
