Originally Posted by
The Situation
About 10 years ago was the first time I flew to the west coast from JFK. Even back then, they budgeted 2 hours for queuing. We left the gate on time, joined the queue and wheels up was 2 hours later, and that was without any tstorms or other events adding chaos, and we landed on time. This doesn't seem out of the ordinary to me and if I am trying to make a connection, I would much rather have too much time budgeted than no enough.
Sure, but what I was attempting to posit — and perhaps it didn’t come across (I may have had a typo), was that unless they push forward all the connecting flight banks, you actually are budgeting LESS connection time. With a greater certainty of making it due to the padded schedule.
Let’s say the old schedule was (for example) 3pm Dp JFK, 5pm Ar MSP, connect to 6pm Dp MSP, 7pm Ar DSM. Now, they pad JFK-MSP with an extra 30 minutes, but unless they push the MSP-DSM departure 30 minutes later, your connection time is down from 60m to 30m. I think that expanding the ENTIRE schedule like this can be very expensive in terms of aircraft utilization. Maybe they have the capacity and that’s what they’ve done. But there are also a lot of threads these days about “can I make a 38 minute connection in MSP?” And I don’t think that was always the case. Now, the answer to that question seems to be “Usually, DL pads the schedule time so there’s a greater chance of being on time/early.” But they could still lose out on a sale from someone who says “I’d still rather connect in ORD on AA with a 60 minute layover.”