Which Flight Routes Have the Most Delays?
Every personal driver has their own theories about which flights are easy pick ups and which ones are tough. As drivers, it is their job to be at the airport when their client lands, and be waiting right outside once their client is ready to rock and roll. In a perfect world, a driver would know exactly when to be at the airport weeks in advance.
What makes picking clients up at the airport the single most difficult trip for drivers is flight delays. Drivers need to be on time, but they also don’t want to waste their time sitting in the cell phone lot as their client’s arrival time keeps getting pushed back. Sure, we have apps to track flights, and apps to track weather, but there is no silver bullet to determining exactly how long a delay will be, or which flights will be delayed.
There are so many factors that affect a flight’s “on-timeyness”. While weather seems to be the main delay culprit, there are so many other reasons for delays. There are airline staffing issues, aircraft maintenance problems, and airport traffic congestion. And then there are much rarer phenomena such as volcanoes, airport shutdowns due to VIP flights (we’re looking at you UN), migratory birds, and all kinds of other events that give our clients flight anxiety and give our drivers pickup malaise.
To bring order to this chaos, we took a deep dive into the Bureau of Transportation Statistics log of flight data to find out which routes are most troublesome, which are most clockwork-esque, and which are most popular. We looked at the data from 2019, because 2020 was not a normal year in any sense. 2020 saw flights cancelled, routes shutdown, and overall traffic cut by a statistically significant amount. We analyzed data for only domestic flights, maybe we can take a look at international flights some other time.
To calculate our on time flight percentages, we ignored “Cancelled” flights, as causes for cancellation can sometimes be different than delays, and the data can be sloppy. We also stripped out all carrier information from our search. Multiple carriers service the most popular routes, and getting into each specific flight’s data was beyond the scope of our inquiry.
We only looked at arrival delays, as sometimes departure delay time can be made up in the air, and passengers generally only care about when they arrive, not when they leave. Also, we only included flights that were delayed 15 minutes or more. Here are the top 20 worst performing routes of 2019, in order:
Flight Routes with the Most Delays, 2019
Not suprisingly, arrivals into Newark, NJ and Fort Lauderdale, FL own the top 11 spots. iDriveYourCar started in the New York area, and we can definitely attest to EWR’s particular awfulness. Between the wildly variable weather and the high passenger AND cargo traffic into and out of EWR, it’s not surprising to see them taking many of the top spots. FLL’s weather and heavy congestion are also major delaying factors. Those thunderstorms in Florida can cause some real flight problems. Oddly enough, the reverse legs of many of these poor performing flights seem to score well, indicating the issues lie with the arrival airport.
On a brighter note, here are best performing routes:
Flight Routes with the Least Delays, 2019
The two factors that stand out are the top performing routes are arriving into “good weather” airports like SLC or OGG, or they are arriving into regional airports with significantly less traffic than the majors like EWR, LAX, ATL etc.
Lastly, here are the most popular routes, by flights (not passengers), in both directions:
Flight Routes with the Most Flights, 2019
It’s really interesting how many flights go between the Hawaiian Islands, but these appear to be smaller flights, and hey, it’s faster than taking a boat!
We look forward to doing some more deep dives into the nitty gritty data of travel. Please feel free to email us with any questions, comments, or concerns at blog@idriveyourcar.com. Also learn how we can make your airport arrival as seamless as possible with our Airport Transportation service, or find out how iDriveYourCar can get you where you need to go in comfort and convenience.