Airline Padding Manufactured Better Punctuality

Since 1995, the average flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport has taken 18 minutes longer, with planes spending more time leaving the gate, taxiing and flying. In response, the airlines added 23 minutes to the published schedule, five minutes more than the actual slowdown of the trip. That extra buffer reduced the share of flights arriving behind schedule from 51 percent to 37 percent, even though the trips themselves became slower.

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