Regular evening EWR departure delays Spring / Summer 2022
May 17, 2022, 5:09 am
#2
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IME, when TATL flights leave late and arrive on time, it's to avoid having aircraft circling to wait for a landing slot, or sitting on the ground at an outstation for longer than scheduled. This is quite common for early evening departures to LHR, where an airline doesn't want to risk arriving before the curfew lifts and either take a quota hit for a pre-06:00 arrival or waste fuel waiting for the clock to tick over. My guess is that there may be gate/apron contention at KEF at the specific time they are scheduled to be there, so they want to use their space for only as long as they need to. Just a guess.
May 17, 2022, 6:53 am
#3
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IME, when TATL flights leave late and arrive on time, it's to avoid having aircraft circling to wait for a landing slot, or sitting on the ground at an outstation for longer than scheduled. This is quite common for early evening departures to LHR, where an airline doesn't want to risk arriving before the curfew lifts and either take a quota hit for a pre-06:00 arrival or waste fuel waiting for the clock to tick over. My guess is that there may be gate/apron contention at KEF at the specific time they are scheduled to be there, so they want to use their space for only as long as they need to. Just a guess.
May 17, 2022, 6:57 am
#4
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Ah I misread the OP, I thought the point was the flight departs late but arrives on time—"the equipment usually arrives on time" is what threw me off.
May 17, 2022, 7:44 am
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IME, when TATL flights leave late and arrive on time, it's to avoid having aircraft circling to wait for a landing slot, or sitting on the ground at an outstation for longer than scheduled. This is quite common for early evening departures to LHR, where an airline doesn't want to risk arriving before the curfew lifts and either take a quota hit for a pre-06:00 arrival or waste fuel waiting for the clock to tick over. My guess is that there may be gate/apron contention at KEF at the specific time they are scheduled to be there, so they want to use their space for only as long as they need to. Just a guess.
May 17, 2022, 9:05 am
#7
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Does not appear to be the case here, as indeed, this thing arrives severely late, daily. FlightAware shows ONE in the last 10 flights arriving within 30 mins of the scheduled arrival...But like the OP says, 8 of the last 10 days it's been HOURS late. Good hypothesis, but for these flights.
David
May 17, 2022, 9:08 am
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But to figure out further what's going on, watch the flight status daily before departure on UA's app/website. There will probably be a reason listed for the delay--which may or may not be 100% factual, but might shed some insight.
May 17, 2022, 9:12 am
#9
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Sorry, I'm not all that well versed in FlightAware beyond simple airport/tail number/flight number searches!
But to figure out further what's going on, watch the flight status daily before departure on UA's app/website. There will probably be a reason listed for the delay--which may or may not be 100% factual, but might shed some insight.
But to figure out further what's going on, watch the flight status daily before departure on UA's app/website. There will probably be a reason listed for the delay--which may or may not be 100% factual, but might shed some insight.
David
May 17, 2022, 9:22 am
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May 17, 2022, 9:30 am
#11
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It often appears the reasons for delay are what the very last reason might have been. For example... if the flight waits 30 minutes or so for passengers and then another five minutes to load those passengers' bags, the reason will be a delay due to baggage loading.
May 17, 2022, 9:32 am
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David
May 17, 2022, 10:20 am
#13
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...Or, those pax beat their bags to the connecting flight. Could just be for one bag loading--looks crazy on the surface, but multiple delay reasons don't code for our view as such--just the last reason. Another interesting one is I've had 2, 3, 4 hour delays that end up listing "it took us longer to load passengers than expected" (or something like that) when we were simply waiting out a mechanical delay. Yeah, it maybe took 5 minutes beyond the 4-hour mechanical delay, but the flight will show and code, as mentioned above, as the last thing that caused a delay.
May 17, 2022, 10:53 am
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May 17, 2022, 11:14 am
#15
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In the last 10 days, only Atlantic Airways (FLI) is doing worse at BIKF. Negative is arriving early, positive is arriving late.
Code:
airline | arrival_delay ---------+------------------ BAW | -00:05:06 BTI | 00:23:24 DAL | -00:09:52 DLH | 00:08:42 EDW | 00:18:00 EZY | -00:04:59 FIN | -00:11:18 FLI | 02:33:45 FPY | -00:09:10 GRL | 00:36:00 ICE | 00:01:13 NOS | 00:17:00 NOZ | -00:13:00 SAS | 00:17:00 TRA | 00:08:08 TVF | 00:04:08 UAL | 01:18:18 VLG | 00:01:24 WUK | 00:05:12 WZZ | 00:06:01.25