If your flight times seem unusually long, that’s because they are.
A New York Times analysis of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data found that average scheduled duration from New York’s JFK airport to Los Angeles has increased 23 minutes since 1995. In general, there’s an average rise in travel time of 18 minutes.
But even though travel time has increased, flights are landing on time, or sometimes even early. The key here is airlines extending their scheduled flight durations more than the actual duration length of the flight, according to the Times.
This is often due to a practice called “padding.”
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“Padding flights has existed for some time and has been a practice for all airlines for decades,” Sabrina Childress-Miller, a Chicago-based former flight attendant with Spirit Airlines and the former communications chairperson of the Association of Flight Attendants Union, told Reader’s Digest .