Question: Which has the most padding: your seat or the airline’s schedule?
Answer: not much padding to the seat but consider the airline’s schedule, says The Wall Street Journal.
"Delta Air Lines Flight 715 from New York to Los Angeles now takes more than seven hours to fly across the country, according to the airline’s March schedule. That’s an hour longer than the same flight in the same type of aircraft in 1996," says the newspaper.
Why is that?
Because across the airline industry, carriers have been adding minutes to "block times" — the scheduled durations — baking delays into trips so that late flights officially arrive "on-time" and operations run better because flights pull into gates more often on schedule, the report says.
Even though the recession has led airlines to cut flights and reduce congestion at many airports and in the skies, the move to pump up schedules has continued.
Last year, most airlines added padding to scores of flights.
"Those numbers can have a real effect on public perception. And in some cases, block times have grown simply because airlines have been making so many schedule changes as they have reduced capacity over the past two years," the report says.
A look at 50 different domestic flights on nine major airlines, including some regional-jet partners, found scheduled flights times were 17 minutes, or 10 percent, longer in airline schedules for a recent month compared to 1996 schedules.
By David Wilkening
