Originally Posted by
Sopwith
It would be interesting to see a proper statistical analysis, i.e. mean delay time and standard deviation so you could assess the necessary connection time to reduce the odds of a misconnect to something acceptable.
(For those unfamiliar, if you assume the delayed arrival times follow a normal distribution, the scheduled arrival time plus mean delay plus two standard deviations equates to a 97.5% probability you will arrive before that time.)
Delays cannot follow a normal distribution, as there is a lower bound. That is, a flight cannot be delayed less than 0 seconds; a flight delayed by a negative time is
not a delayed flight - it arrived early. Meanwhile, there is no upper bound to how long a flight can be delayed (particularly with Air Canada.)
You are looking for something more like a Poisson distribution.