Flight duration increases - tracked somewhere?
 

I'm looking at LON-MAD flights and I noticed scheduled duration is around 2.5 hours. I used to fly this route regularly in 2007/2008 and if I recall correctly it used to be around 2hrs/2hrs10mins??

Is there a site that tracks flight duration increases year-by-year?

Old paper timetables, if you can find one. Or online if you can find them archived somewhere. Is OAG still in business, anyone?

Maybe the schedules are padded a bit for "on time performance"?

Fight duration increases - tracked somewhere?
 

Jeannietx- I presume that's the OPs point. It's an interesting question- how has published times changed since airlines are on the hook to publish on time performance?

Similarly has air traffic had an effect?

A "paper timetable"? What is that? :D Gen Y'er here... ;)

When I flew LON-MAD regularly I believe there was not much padding as, if I recall correctly, flight time was around 1hr50.

I'm quite interested in records of flight duration vs scheduled duration over the years and/or on a per-flight basis for recent flights.

The flight times (in the air) have not changed much in decades.
Congestion on the ground has. The time from aircraft door closed to wheels up and touch down to aircraft door open has changed a lot. More aircraft equals more on ground congestion. And schedule padding so the on time performance figures look good.

Yes.

http://www.oag.com/

The library at my university has all the OAGs going back to something like 1960. I remember looking at some of them from the 1990s and early 2000s, and it is quite obvious how much schedule padding has increased since then.

They're not on paper anymore, but there are PDF's floating around.

Just flew YYZ-ORD last night and we were delayed on the ground over am hour. Of course, the flight arrived 15 minutes after scheduled arrival because UA scheduled 1hr 55min for a 60min flight. That's some serious schedule padding.

I used to be a regular commuter on MCI-ORD on an AA 727. The crew would often announce the flight as 57 or 58 minutes in the air. Now, with a mix of various RJ types on both UA and AA, it's more like 1:05 to 1:10 in the air.

Whether that's due to ATC or operational efficiency (saving fuel), I don't know.

I just assume airlines add padding to their schedules to improve on-time performance, but that's a separate issue. Frankly, I'm okay with that as it surely reduces misconnects across the board (vs. a more tightly-wound schedule that still has 35-minute connections in hubs). I don't think I've ever been angry at an airline for getting me to the destination 20 minutes early. ;)

I was looking at award flights, and there was a list from SFO to LAX. I found it hilarious how they varied from 1h25min to 2h, and there is no correlation to plane type. The 2h is at 8pm-wonder if they are padding for all the delays through the day?

This, probably. My last AF took off from CDG 45 minutes late but still arrived in SIN "on time." :confused: