https://www.xataka.com/magnet/vuelos-se-han-vuelto-lentos-ultimas-decadas

Maybe our planes are more modern, more comfortable, emit less CO2 and allow us to spend our entire journey watching movies on the screen built into the seat, but there’s one thing they don’t do: get us to our destination faster than we have time. parents making the same trip on an airline from 30 or more years ago. It sounds counterintuitive, but that’s the way it is. Flights are much slower now than they were decades ago.

Interestingly (or not) they are also more punctual.

It seems ridiculous, but it makes sense.

Slower flights? Yes, much slower. Recently Ben Blatt, a reporter specializing in data journalism, dug into data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and discovered something surprising: Despite appearances, airlines have increased their flight times.

His conclusions were expressed in a paper published this week. New York Times Here he cites a revealing fact: The average scheduled time for a flight between New York’s John F. Kennedy airport and Los Angeles has increased by 23 minutes since the mid-90s.

Are there more examples? Some. In fact, Blatt is not the first to notice this interesting phenomenon. Special magazine in 2018 Which Travel He has already published a study concluding that flight time has increased by an average of 35 minutes over the decade. There are analyzes that claim to detect the trend on routes operated by Ryanair or Virgin Atlantic.

Before the pandemic, the BBC also repeated some examples. According to their calculations, while a flight between New York and Washington D.C. took 45 minutes in 1960, it took an average of 75 minutes in 2019. The same was true of New York and Los Angeles, which Blatt analyzed. In the 60s it went from five hours to six.

Do trips take longer? Here’s another of the ideas Blatt puts forward. Unlike other previous analyses, it devoted itself to going into detail about the duration of trips and came up with a significant surprise: over the last 30 years, the duration of almost the entire operation, from boarding to taxiing during takeoff and landing, has clearly increased. There are also hours when planes are in the air.

As an example, he compared the average flight between JFK (New York) and LAX (Los Angeles) airports in 2023 with the same itinerary in 1995. His conclusions are intriguing.

Boarding delays increased from eight minutes to 13 minutes. Supposed taxi exit timeThe time immediately before takeoff has been increased by 60 seconds, from 24 minutes to 25 minutes. and he time to take a taxiThe equivalent operation during landing increased by 3 minutes, from eight to 11 minutes. The time spent in the air increased from 5 hours 20 minutes in 1995 to 5 hours 29 minutes in 2023. ? The traveler’s total journey time increased from 6 hours to 6 hours 18 minutes.

So are they more punctual? Yes, the comparison between current flights and flights a few decades ago doesn’t always leave current operations in a bad light. Another result of the study is that services are now more punctual than before. In the case of the JFK-LAX connection, the percentage of flights arriving at their destinations after scheduled time was 37%, a far cry from 51% in 1995. So, the majority of trips now arrive on or before their due date. .

But the photo as a whole is a little more complicated. It’s less common for a flight to experience a slight delay – TNYT notes that around 30% of services will experience delays of up to 60 minutes in 2023, up from 45% in the 90s; but the percentage of flights with long delays is increasing.

“When things get bad, they get real bad,” Blatt says ironically. That means there is an increase in flights with significant delays of 90 minutes or even three or more hours. In these cases, its frequency reaches record values ​​with slight fluctuations.

But… Why? That’s the big question. Why do flights take longer now than they did thirty years ago? And why do they arrive early more often if they are apparently slower? Are both trends related to each other? To answer this, it is necessary to consider an important concept that the BBC already talked about many years ago: the “carrying programme” or “filling programme”, bed The amount of time airlines allow to fly from one point to another.

It may seem strange that companies leave this margin to themselves instead of speeding up their scheduling to the maximum in order to gain competitive edge and offer attractive times to the customer, but in reality they have very few disadvantages and some valuable advantages.

What advantages? The most important of these is to have more satisfied customers. With this “fill-in” program, it is easier for companies to create the illusion of punctuality and health in terms of reliability, one of the values ​​they most advertise. Not to mention that in some cases the delay could lead to compensation being paid to passengers, which could penalize the company financially.

“With drag fares, airlines are gaming the system to fool you,” Michael Baiada, chairman of aviation consultancy ATH Group, told the BBC. The aim of flights is to reach the destination at “A0”, that is, exactly at the scheduled time, which avoids changes to terminal planning. However, anything between this scheduled time and what is known as “A14” (i.e., 14 minutes after the originally scheduled time) is not equivalent to arriving “late” in the eyes of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Is this a problem? This is a reasonable question. If our flight arrives within the airline’s promised margin and we, as customers, leave the airport satisfied because we arrived at our destination on time, what is wrong with the “carriage schedule”? Is it a problem that companies give themselves so little permission? bed To ensure punctuality? That’s one way to look at it.

Another is what Baiada explained in 2019: “Drag program causes higher costs in terms of fuel consumption, noise and CO2 […]. “If the airline’s efficiency increases, costs decrease, which benefits both the environment and wages.”

The head of the ATH Group also reminds that this cushion perhaps allows airlines to artificially improve punctuality data, but even so “more than 30% of flights arrive more than 15 minutes late every day”.

Is everything negative? No. With or without this margin, airlines are demanding investments to make their operations more efficient and sustainable; This is an important factor for their future. In fact, there are already countries that have initiated debate on whether to ban short-haul flights where there are alternatives with a lower CO2 footprint, such as rail. Lavanya Marla, professor of systems engineering at the University of Illinois, shares an equally interesting thought about delays on TNYT.

The most serious delays, perhaps lasting 90 minutes or several hours, have increased, but daily operations and crew scheduling have also been optimized for maximum efficiency. And that could spell trouble if things go wrong, considering airlines operate hundreds of flights a day.

So what does this mean? “If you create a very well-designed program, you can do the same task with fewer people. When it works, it’s great. But when an unexpected event occurs, the program necessarily has no room for maneuver,” warns Marla. As a result, taxiing times on the runway increase (taxi-ouwith take a taxi) may have increased in recent years, but at a lesser rate than traffic density.

For example, New York Times He cites the example of New York’s LaGuardia Airport: Taxi check-out time is now 24 minutes, compared to 19 minutes in the ’90s, true; but this increase is “only” 26%. Over the same period, departures increased by 64% on exactly the same number of routes.

Pictures | Anete Lūsiņa (Unsplash) and Rocker Sta (Unsplash)

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