Airlines Adding More Time to Their Scheduled Flight Times

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, airlines are adding more time to their scheduled flight times:

“Across the airline industry, carriers have been adding minutes to “block times”—the scheduled durations—baking delays into trips so that late flights officially arrive “on-time” and operations run better because flights pull into gates more often on schedule.

For some airlines, longer scheduled times for flights reflects the reality of inefficiency in the nation’s air travel system, which often can’t handle the volume of planes without delay, especially when bad weather hits. For others, lengthening scheduled arrival times boosts on-time rankings charted by the Department of Transportation: Those numbers can have a real effect on public perception. And in some cases, block times have grown simply because airlines have been making so many schedule changes as they have reduced capacity over the past two years. Flights that took off without a wait can now end up stuck waiting behind a line of jets because departure times have been changed.”

With the recent security changes, and now these “padded” block times, it appears as though we are going to take a little longer getting to where we want to go.

Don’t worry, you can always log on to The Roaming Boomers website, and we will do our best to keep you informed and entertained.