Thanks for all of the positive feedback! Glad everyone is finding this interesting....
Originally Posted by
DLATL777
I find it very humorous that people quote block times as flight times. ATL-JNB is NOT 15 hours 25 minutes and JNB-ATL is not nearly 17 hours.
I take these flights often in different seasons and my longest ATL-JNB was 14 hours 55 minutes and JNB-ATL was 16 hours and 5 minutes. My variation is also very small, my shortest/longest are only separated by 10 minutes. This is actual flight time.
I've considered going with actual flying time but when you look at DL 201 JNB-ATL you'll see varied durations based on real life conditions:
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL201
For example, a few data points from the past few months:
16:06
15:47
16:25
16:20
17:25
17:59
16:07
16:02
16:04
15:53
I've considered looking at a quick average over the past few days but it seems like too much work so I have just decided use whatever the airline publishes as scheduled flying time. It's not perfect but does a decent job at comparing apples to apples.