Will my flight be late?
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resolved May 9
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My last flight was delayed 5.5 hours! Will my return flight arrive on time? (United, US transcontinental flight)
Close date updated to 2022-05-09 11:59 pm
Get Ṁ200 play money
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Thanks!
Oh yeah that's an interesting point, the schedules are set far in advance so they can't take into account fine grained weather patterns. In fact they probably need to build in some buffer for inclement weather which would suggest flights on days with good weather should tend to arrive early.
I suspect that most airlines quote longer times when you book the flight than what they actually expect, basically including a buffer amount. I suspect this because most flights I'm on seem to outperform the quoted times and arrive "early")
(Warning, this might be an infohazard if you start adjusting your planning assuming your flights come in earlier than quoted)
Or it's also possible arrival times have fat tails, so the median flight takes less time than "expected", which uses the mean time
Some base rates: https://www.bts.gov/topics/airlines-and-airports/annual-airline-time-rankings-2003-2020
84% of flights have "on-time" arrival, which is defined as arriving within 15 minutes of the scheduled time, meaning 16% are >=15 min late. I'll use this 15 minute threshold for this market.
I'm typing this from the tarmac where my flight currently has a 40 minute delay to the departure time, and yet the current estimated arrival time confusingly shows as 10 minutes earlier than scheduled???
Curious what base rates are for all flights on lateness, or what the distribution looks like on [actual arrival - expected arrival]
Also, conditional on you having been on one late flight, I think it's a bit more likely that another flight you take will be late, because you're the kind of person to take flight paths that might end up getting delayed??