invisible

Question - if you fly a lot (>50K-100K miles per year), is there any correlation of IROPS vs 10K miles/segments flown?

In other words, if one flies >50K miles/50 segments per year, is there a certainty to have at least one IROPS?

P.S. I know some people can be particularly unlucky.

darthbimmer

Number of IRROPS per 10k miles flown is the wrong way to count it. Flying long haul routes like transpacific or Europe-Western US, 10k miles is less than one RT, and IRROPS are uncommon on these routes, at least IME. But on short haul routes 10k miles could be 10-15 RTs, and these are more likely impacted by IRROPS. Then, too, there's locality and seasonal factors: summer thunderstorms in the midwest, winter snowstorms in the midwest and northeast, etc.

TravelerMSY

Irops are pretty directly related to how late in the day you fly. Compare flying only at 5am on a nonstop vs. evening flights with a connection or two and you'll see a big difference

SwissBritMiss

I must be particularly unlucky I've had 5 IRROPs in the past few years: one was long haul (SIN to ZRH) and two were early morning flights (of which one was due to fog at LCY). The other two occasions (LH and LX) were admittedly late, intra-Europe flights, but both overnight and one made me miss half of Christmas!

To the OP - for your stats, I have on average I have an IRROP once every 30k. I don't count segments, but I fly an even mix of short and long haul on almost exclusively *A.

ft101

That may be true if your thinking is that first flight in the morning should be on time as the plane has been parked up all night, and that there's also no chance of knock on delays having built up over time.

However, if you fly with an airline that runs round the clock operations it probably makes no difference at all.

darthbimmer

There's also a big difference in impact between whether you're flying nonstop or making a connection. A few years back was "The Summer From Hell" at SFO, my base for most of my flying at the time, and probably about 50% of my flights in/out of SFO were IRROPS. Thankfully most of my trips were short, non-stop flights so the impact was not severe. Hour and a half or two hour delay? Annoying, but at least I'm not stranded somewhere 1000 miles from both home and destination because of a missed connection. And with short nonstops there's rarely any point asking to be assigned to another flight.... Usually the delayed nonstop is still the fastest way to get there!

Tchiowa

IME, too. Almost all my flying is TPAC and I almost never see an IRROPS.

gooselee

I fly mostly short-haul domestic US flights to the tune of 90k miles/year. If I consider an IRROP to be, say, a 30+ minute delay that also impacts on-time arrival, I'd say I experience one every 15-20 segments. Double that if you count *any* delay whatsoever - but I tend not to count those because often a 10-15 min delay is made back up in the air and we still arrive on time.

Of course, there are instances where they stack - late summer trip with a late afternoon connection and a storm system passing through? It's not a question of if IRROPs will happen, it's to what extent and will your 2nd flight be delayed enough so you can still make it from your delayed 1st flight.

Thankfully, I've only experienced one cancellation in the past year or so, and I simply rebooked to a different routing and arrived an hour later than planned.

Kiwi Flyer

For me, very few irrops longhaul and shorthaul is widely variable. I fly a lot of prop flights and also in & out of an airport that has weather issues. Sometimes you get lucky and no issues for a year or more (with 100+ flights per annum). Sometimes you have multiple irrops in the same week.

teddybear99

Sometimes the first flight in the morning may be delayed because it will be operated by the crew who brought the plane into the outlier station the night before. The incoming flight was delayed enough that the crew who are staying overnight in the airlines' crew hotel needs their mandated rest time before returning to duty.

In the USA, as to east coast cities, their morning flights may be delayed as they are waiting on the equipment flying in from the red eyes from the west coast. I don't envy the people who have to coordinate flight ops as once a plane gets delayed on it's daily schedule it is hard to recover because you don't just have planes sitting around on the tarmac waiting to be used. The longer a plane sits on the ground, the less money the airline is making or the more it is losing. This even happens at their hubs as now, most airlines sub out their maintenance work at alternate airports than the hubs.

ProleOnParole

I don't fly nearly as much but here's my take:

The number of IR(R)OPS wouldn't directly depend on the distance travelled but rather on the number of segments flown.

In fact, people who clock up a lot of miles can be very unlikely to experience delays if they primarily do long-haul, where schedules allow more leeway, so the flight can leave delayed and still arrive ahead of time, which also makes subsequent flights less prone to disruptions stacking up. Further, airlines try to make sure those flights are the last to be affected.

For a given number of miles, you're much more likely to suffer delays flying short-haul then, and it's not as much about luck as whether you fly:

• to or from a busy airport (not necessarily related to size but tight intervals between flight operations, think LHR)
• in the late afternoon or in the evening (unless the airline operates their equipment without a break for the night, they are less likely to start the day with a delay)
• on carriers that maximize aircraft utilization, particularly operating away from their base (a single technical issue affects many flights and no replacement aircraft immediately available)
• into areas that experience seasonal severe weather patterns as opposed to where the weather is more or less stable throughout the year (think ORD vs ATL)

Finally, some airlines have the propensity to go on strike while on other carriers it's virtually impossible as the perpetrators would quickly be lined up, executed, and fed to the pigs (well, not sure about that last part).

5khours

Ditto. I've flown over 1000 TPACs and had.

1 weather cancellation
1 tsunami cancellation
1 mechanical cancellation
1 diversion to ANC because of a pax illness
1 mechanical diversion to ANC
1 mechanical diversion to SFO
1 typhoon diversion to NGO
1 snow diversion to MSP
1 three hour mechanical delay

Well under 1%

ft101

Where I am the short hauls park up at their bases (of which they may have several), where there are usually multiple sets of crews. They don't park overnight at the "other" end of the route.