I made a similar post last year as I had noticed that flights I was on frequently left late but “made up time in the air.”  A USA Today article (linked in the prior post) had some interesting statistics and it seems that the trend of padding schedule to be “on-time” has continued at airlines in recent months.  The most interesting comparisons in this article are with nearly identical flights from 1996 on the same type of aircraft.  One would expect that keeping those things constant would reveal very similar flight times, but that isn’t the case.  Even in most of those cases the flight times had increased, often dramatically.

Delta Air Lines Flight 715 from New York to Los Angeles now takes more than seven hours to fly across the country, according to the airline’s March schedule. That’s an hour longer than the same flight in the same type of aircraft took in 1996. A Phoenix-Las Vegas flight at Southwest Airlines that used to be scheduled at 60 minutes now gets 80 minutes. What was once a two-hour American Airlines trip from Chicago to Newark, N.J., now is two-and-a-half hours, according to the airline’s schedule.

Despite the fact that much of this is obvious to travelers, the relevance here is that it is important to keep on-time performance in context since very often the people/companies being measured set the schedules and keep the statistics themselves.

The Middle Seat: Why a Six-Hour Flight Now Takes Seven. Scott McCartney. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Feb 4, 2010. pg. D.1