The Middle Seat Terminal Blog had THIS post today regarding schedules and schedule padding.   The question was, are airlines cheating when they pad their schedules to improve their on-time rating?

From the point of view of a consumer looking at their on-time rating, it might be a cheat.  Frankly, I think there is little value as a consumer to look at an airline’s overall on-time rating.  Now, it does help to see what the rating is for a particular flight and/or similar flights through FlightStats.com.  But even then I would take such information with a grain of salt.

There are too many variables involved to make your choice on the basis of an on-time rating.  You have to consider the cities involved, the time of year and weather, the equipment being used and even what impact severe weather at another hub might be having on a route.   For instance, Dallas might not be badly impacted by weather much at all at any time of the year but what if Chicago is and the equipment used for a Dallas originating flight comes from a flight between Chicago and Dallas?   What is a flight was being served by equipment with a poor dispatch rate such as an ERJ-145 and suddenly gets replaced with newer and better CRJ-700’s?   

Schedules should be evaluated for whether or not a particular flight will get you where you want to go at the time you want to go.  Period.  Smart consumers will now that leaving themselves 30 minutes connection time at a hub will result in lost baggage and/or missed connections. 

But are the airlines cheating?  No, not really.  Frankly, airlines needed to adjust the block times for routes for years before it really got done.  Block times, the time a flight leaves a gate to the time it arrives at its arrival gate, are important and they have grown considerably.  Airports are busier than ever. 

I can remember that a DFW to ORD flight in the mid 1970’s used to take right about 2 hours in block time.   Today, it’s about 2 hours, 45 minutes.  That reflects the arrival of hub operations, crowded airports and very old infrastructure in place.   It’s amusing to me that some trans-continental flights are now calling for as much as 7 hours transit time.  That’s as much time as the last prop airliners were doing it in the late 1950’s. 

Rather than calling it cheating, I’d say that “padding” isn’t padding.  It’s getting real with reality for the first time in quite a while and that means consumers can count on the airline doing what it said it would do which makes the entire experience more pleasant.  However, that kind of reality scheduling will go on only as long as it receives some scrutiny so its good that someone such as journalists are reporting those rates on a regular basis.

Filed under: Airline Service by ajax