Scott McCartney at the Wall Street Journal took this on recently and started digging around. Evan at FlightCaster took it one further and analyzed all flight times. So what’s the result. Since 1996, schedule times have bumped up 8 minutes on average.

Of course, that number isn’t very relevant. You need to look at the biggest pain points to see where the most egregious increases are. JFK saw an average 27 minute increase on departures while Continental’s late afternoon departures from Chicago to Newark bumped up a whopping 45 minutes. My question is . . . so what?

Some passengers think this is an evil plot to make it look like they have a stellar on time record, but that makes absolutely no sense. First of all, think about it from a passenger standpoint. If you book a flight leaving at 8a and arriving at 4p, isn’t that what you expect? Does it matter if you arrive a couple minutes early?

Sure, it’s annoying when you arrive 45 minutes early and your ride is nowhere to be found, but that’s an anomaly. Think about it from the airline side. Do they want to pad their schedule? Absolutely not. If they could schedule their flights to take less time, they could cram more flights into a day and bring their costs down. That would be fantastic. So why do they pad?

Well think about it. Gate-to-gate flight times have actually gone up in the last 15 years. As airports have become more crowded, they’ve been forced to spend more time taxiing or holding in the air. And it’s not just blanket changes like that. Weather patterns matter as well. If you have particularly stormy time of year, you might build in some extra time for circling. During the winter, the airlines have longer block times on westbound flights across the country because the headwinds are stronger.

This is a science. The airlines have to delicately balance the desire to cram as many flights in a day as possible with the need to present passengers with an on time experience. People and computers are constantly working on trying to find the optimal block times, but that’s easier said than done. Things change often, and that means they can never be perfectly right. But they certainly aren’t trying to cheat.

Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan In the Spotlight
I’ve talked about it before, but the Pratt & Whitney Geared Turbofan is getting closer to reality. But when will we really know if it’s a success?

Southwest’s Load Planning System Improves Baggage Processes
Things happening under the wing are easy to overlook by the traveling public, but sometimes they can bring big benefits.

Last December, Howard Kronberg was a passenger on a flight about to touch down at the airport in Newark, New Jersey when he feared his life was over. “It’s a catastrophic accident waiting to happen.”

Oh good, so a passenger with no flying experience knows that it’s a horribly unsafe maneuver? Please. As tempting as it may be, I can’t say I fault this guy for thinking that. A go-around can be a scary thing if you don’t know what’s happening. So who can I fault? The AP for putting this garbage on the air.

Go-arounds are a normal part of flying. If there’s any question that landing on a runway would be unsafe, then the best possible move is to go around and try again. This can happen because another plane doesn’t clear the runway fast enough, the plane comes in too fast or too high, or maybe the weather is too bad at the moment. In these cases, it’s a safer move to go around than to try to get on the ground.

I find it incredible that the report states that some controllers say that going around makes a mid-air collision more likely, yet there’s no source on that at all. In fact, the only controller they interview says it’s “the safe route out.”

I’ve been through more than one go-around in my life, and I’ll admit that it can be a little tense since you don’t know why it’s happening. But just remember, pilots don’t want to go around either. The sooner they land, the sooner they can go home (or to the hotel). So if you’re going around, there’s a good reason for it, and your pilot is keeping you safe.

Pieces like these hold absolutely no value other than to scare people with something that isn’t unsafe. I wish there was some stronger oversight at the AP, because this report never should have seen the light of day.

Just about everyone is used to the stepped approach that has been the standard for some time (and I’ll guess nobody has experienced the drunken pilot approach). You know the feeling. The pilot reduces thrust, you start to descend, then he increases it and you start to flatten out. This goes on for quite some time until you end up on the ground. It’s like going down stairs, whereas the CDA is like going down a ramp. When the aircraft gets ready to descend, the pilot cuts power and the plane maintains a constant rate of descent all the way until touchdown.

That means no more powering up along the way and no more ear-busting changes in pitch of the aircraft. As you can imagine, that helps reduce noise (since the engines don’t spool up) and it helps reduce fuel usage. Good news for everyone, right? Why wouldn’t they have done this before?

Well, it’s not like there’s unlimited room to pull something like this off. You need to make sure that during your continuous descent, you don’t happen to get in the way of, oh, say, airplanes coming from Ontario or one of the other many airports in Southern California.

That’s why this can only be implemented for landings from the East. If you come from the North and West, you usually have to make that turn around downtown LA to come in. There just isn’t enough room to make this work out there. The good news, however, is that half of the arrivals at the airport come from the East. Although only half of those are using CDA right now, the other half will be soon enough.

This procedure was first tested in Louisville, and there was a “34 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions below 3,000 feet, and a 30 percent reduction in aircraft noise within 15 miles of the airport. UPS aircraft flying this approach also save between 250 and 465 pounds of fuel per flight.” Sounds good to me. Maybe this will get some of those testy airport neighbors to stop whining so much.

They’re also rolling this out in other airports, so next time you come in for landing, see if you notice any difference.

Anyway, I was out walking the dog a little after 530p when I saw an Airborne Express 767 fly overhead lined up for runway 7L. He throttled up and ended up going around before landing on 12. This seemed really odd to me, because I’ve never seen a large jet operate on those smaller runways. I’ve only seen them on 12/30. So, I went back and listened to the tower archives on liveatc.net to see what was going on.

Here’s the conversation that occurred:

ABX1753: Tower, Abex1753 Heavy, we’re trying to get on runway 12 here
LGB Tower: Abex1753, Long Beach Tower, runway 12 cleared to land
ABX1753: Cleared to land runway 12, Abex1753

Then a couple minutes later . . .

ABX1753: Are we cleared to land runway 12?
LGB Tower: Abex1753 Heavy, you’re lined up for runway 7L right now
ABX1753: Ok, we’d like to go around for 1753

Needless to say, the tower cleared him to execute a missed approach, and that’s what I saw. Now I’ll get to the point . . . how the heck does that happen?!? Shouldn’t an aircraft know with which runway it’s lined up? I mean, even a simple compass could tell you that you’re lined up at heading 070. Can someone explain this?

That’s easy enough, but the international world makes it a lot harder. You always have this problem when traveling between the northern and southern hemispheres since the seasons are reversed. Right now, for example, LA and Auckland are only three hours apart, but in March when the US springs forward and New Zealand falls back, the difference will be five hours. Most of Asia does not have Daylight Saving Time either, so twice a year, they see times shifting as well.

But this year is a special kind of year since the US changed when it observes Daylight Saving Time. See, until now, the US and the EU changed clocks on the same date, so everything was fine. [EDIT 11/6 @ 847a: I was wrong, there used to actually be a one week lag in the Spring, so this year it has just expanded in size.] But this year the US moved Daylight Saving up a couple of weeks in March and back a week in October/November, so now there are a few weeks, including last week, where times are really messed up in the extremely busy transatlantic market.

At most airports, that’s no big deal, because there’s room to move. But at congested airports like London/Heathrow or Frankfurt, the airlines don’t have slot flexibility so I assumed they’d have to just change around their flights in the US. But what about when that involves flights at New York/JFK or Chicago/O’Hare, also congested airports? This gets very tricky and the result is a hodgepodge of schedule changes for some airlines.

International carriers almost exclusively appear to change their US departure and arrival times by one hour during this period, as you might expect. So a flight that leaves London at say, 430p and arrives LAX at 730p would have arrived at 830p for last week only. US carriers, however, don’t seem to treat it the same way all the time.

Looking at American, for example, most flights do appear to change flight times in the US whether it be an arrival or departure. But the London to Chicago flights all change their London departure times in order to keep connections in the US. To make things even more confusing, the return flights from Chicago actually change their Chicago departure times. Look at JFK, however, and the London flights change both their US departure and arrival times. As you can imagine, arriving into the US an hour later means missed connections and longer waits for the next flight.

Delta deals with this by changing their non-US flight times. So, US connecting times remain intact. But this begs the question . . . how do they get Frankfurt to let them change times for a week? If anyone has more information on this, let me know in the comments section.

But don’t worry, it’s not actually a ninja repeatedly kicking a seal in the head, nor is it a dog that got loose in the belly of the plane . . . it’s just the Power Transfer Unit (PTU).

First, here’s a little background. These aircraft each have two separate hydraulic systems. Those hydraulic systems power some pretty important things, like flight controls. Each of those systems is powered by an engine-driven pump. One is on the left side while the other is on the right.

When both pumps are working, there’s no need for the PTU, but when only one pump is working, the PTU enables a single pump to also power the hydraulics on the opposite side. It’s most common to hear this while taxiing, because you’ll often taxi with one engine to save fuel. When both engines are running, all sounds normal.

So next time you hear the noise, just remember it’s nothing bad. Now you can reassure your fellow passengers that all is well. (Cue “The More You Know” music.)

For more info, read this article.