Airlines around the world pad their schedules, and US carriers are no exception. Scheduled flight times have a curious habit of lengthening over time, even as aircraft technology, navigation systems, and operational tools continue to improve.
A rational observer might expect the opposite. If airlines repeatedly fly the same route between the same two cities, shouldn’t they become more efficient? Yet the schedule data often tells a different story.
For passengers, this matters because published flight times are not simply measures of distance or aircraft performance. They are operational tools. Airlines build buffer into schedules to improve on-time performance, absorb delays, and protect network reliability. The result is that identical city pairs can have noticeably different scheduled block times depending on the airline operating the flight.
In other words, time in the airline industry is a flexible commodity.
This model explores how that flexibility shows up across the US market. Using the US Department of Transportation’s On-Time dataset, we examine schedule padding and carrier differences across four interactive analysis pages. To limit the model’s size, we focus on the Top Twenty cities.
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