Cleared for Takeoff, from Prof. Charles Pennington
Flying is a miserable experience. I’ll leave it at that, but trust me, I could rant, if anyone would like to hear it.
Here, though, is a tip. Fly early in the day. Here are the statistics on four American Airline flights from LaGuardia (LGA) to Atlanta (ATL), for the time period Jan 1, 2006-Aug 1, 2006:
Flight# SchdDeprTime #LateFlights/#AllFlights
2377 640AM 30/211
4864 1215PM 43/182
2393 355PM 68/200
1297 740PM 117/196
So the 640AM flight was “late” only 30/211 times, or 14% of the time. The 7:40PM flight was “late” 117/196 times, or 60% of the time.
On average, the 640AM flight departed 27 minutes late. This is the average lateness of all flights, not just the “late” ones. (It actually arrived 5 minutes early, on average, because of schedule-padding.) The 740PM flight departed 70 minutes late, on average, and arrived 42 minutes late.
This material can be looked up on the BTS site.