"There's been a change in your itinerary" – Why are the flights now longer?

9/20/2018 6:55:59 PM

The accepted answer is incorrect. We have slot controls at only a few U.S. airports, and neither LAX nor IAD is one.

The answer is that airlines adjust schedules all the time. That’s a big increase but not unprecedented. There are so many interconnected factors at play that it’s nearly impossible to get a neat answer.

9/18/2018 8:11:22 PM

Airlines sometimes make a push to improve their on-time statistics, and this usually includes publishing longer flight times, which will automatically improve the on-time performance for any flight not already running at 100%.

9/18/2018 9:39:47 PM

For any particular flight, you could look it up in FlightAware and see if there’s an annotation for the change. Most probably not. For any particular flight, Rory’s answer is likely correct – that it’s a gate scheduling issue.

However, there’s a general trend in the aviation industry to post longer flight times for the same routes than previously:

  1. Airlines are flying airplanes slower to save fuel. Back when there was competition and we used travel agents, the fastest flights would show first in SABRE and other databases but as airlines monopolize routes and people sort by price and not time, there’s no reason not to slow down to save fuel.

  2. Congestion at airports, cuts to maintenance, number of standby planes and crew, and other operational issue means they need to build in more buffer time for an ontime arrival. No one likes to arrive late while arriving early seems a crowd pleaser.

9/18/2018 2:06:58 PM

The two most likely causes are a change in routing or a change in take off and landing slots.

Routes can change for various reasons, some may be longer or shorter. They usually don’t make that much of a difference to a short flight (although it can happen if one route had a better jetstream, those are usually variable)

Most likely is a rearrangement of logistics meaning take off or landing slots have changed meaning the aircraft needs to take less or more time to get to its slot. These may be changed due for seasonal reasons, or because an airport rearranges to accommodate new bids for the most desirable time slots etc.

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

About me

Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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