Flying for turkey day? Be glad you’re not in Philadelphia
City’s airport has 2nd-highest delay rate
What you always suspected is true — flying to or from Pittsburgh on the day before Thanksgiving is terrible.
But here’s something to be thankful for: At least we’re not Philadelphia.
Data from the U.S. Department of Transportation shows that during the week of Thanksgiving, the worst day for delays in flight departures from Pittsburgh is the Wednesday before the holiday.
While there is some annual variation — during the past two years, for instance, the Sunday before has been the most abysmal travel day in terms of delays — over the past five years, at least one in every five Thanksgiving eve flights into or out of Pittsburgh International Airport has been delayed at least 15 minutes.
Most of those delays are significant. The majority are at least a half-hour long, and over the past five years, 28 have been more than two hours long.
Philly, though, is the real turkey.
People flying into the City of Brotherly Love on Thanksgiving Wednesday have been delayed onethird of the time over the past five years — the second-worst showing among the nation’s big airports, behind only West Palm Beach.
Flying out for Thanksgiving, just under a quarter of
Philadelphia’s flights are delayed, but Philadelphians can take heart — their rate is still better than what travelers face in Syracuse, Akron, Chicago and Baltimore.
According to Vinayak Deshpande, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s business school who researches airline flight delays, backups are likely due to the combination of more flights and more passengers. Flight congestion makes it harder to get runway time, he noted. Higher passenger numbers, meanwhile, means more time needed on the ground for things like loading luggage and cleaning the plane.
“And airlines don’t allocate any extra time for their flights, in general,” Mr. Deshpande said. “In an ideal world you’d add a little bit more buffer.”
Alyson Walls, spokeswoman for the Pittsburgh airport, confirmed that the day before Thanksgiving is one of the facility’s biggest travel days. Airport officials expect more than 100,000 people to fly out of Pittsburgh in the three days before Thanksgiving, compared to around 60,000 in an average three-day period.
Thanksgiving week, of course, is not the only stretch for running into chronic delays. Data shows that winter on the whole sees more delays than the rest of the year — in fact, 16 percent of flights out of Pittsburgh in December have been delayed over the past five years, slightly above the 14 percent of flights for the calendar year.
In what might have been a harbinger of things to come, Tina Blaine, a musician from Alameda, Calif. who was flying home Monday morning after teaching a workshop in Pittsburgh, was badly delayed coming in last Wednesday due to mechanical problems.
“Every flight was sold out,” Ms. Blaine said. “And it was still a week away from Thanksgiving.”
She ended up being rerouted through Reno and Las Vegas when she missed her St. Louis connection — and a good meal. “I ate the world’s worst Cobb salad in Las Vegas,” she complained.
Ms. Blaine was flying Southwest, which has the worst November-to-January delay record of the major airlines over the past five years at Pittsburgh International Airport.
More than 20 percent of Southwest’s flights into Pittsburgh have been delayed in those months, compared with 18 percent for all airlines. And 16 percent of those going out have been delayed, compared with 14 percent overall.
Most of the other delays into or out of Pittsburgh have come from the smaller low-cost or regional airlines. The worst, according to federal data: ExpressJet.
In a written response, Southwest pointed out that they have the most flights in and out of Pittsburgh (about 30 percent of all flights over the past five years) and that this year, “Our average ontime performance at PIT is slightly above our five-year average at the airport, and we are still posting strong operational performance results.”
So in light of that, why are there still so many delays?
According to Mr. Deshpande, one major reason for delays in general is that airlines intentionally schedule less time than they actually need. Because the FAA will let airlines count delays under 15 minutes as “on time,” airlines plan for delays of anywhere from five to 15 minutes.
“The true percentage of on-time arrivals is actually 50 percent, rather than the 70 to 80 percent that airlines advertise,” Mr. Deshpande said.
Some delays depend on the airport and location. In general, said Mr. Deshpande, the bigger East Coast airports have more delays, due to congestion, and Northern airports in the U.S. are worse due to weather problems.
The data for Pittsburgh flights bears that out. The most frequently delayed winter flights out of Pittsburgh are those to Newark, N.J., and New York City. Even worse, nearly 1 in 10 Pittsburgh-to-Newark flights between November and January have been canceled over the past five years.
Want to leave Pittsburgh and see the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve? Bring an extra magazine. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, over a third of flights into New York and Newark from Pittsburgh are delayed.
Flights bound for Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore and Miami from Pittsburgh also fare poorly.
Flight scheduling is up to airlines, and weather is out of everyone’s control, but airport resources can also affect delays, said Mr. Deshpande.
“Our airfield and snow-removal teams do a great job; they win awards year after year, “said Ms. Walls.
Pittsburgh does have about 5 percent fewer delays annually as a proportion of flights than the national average, despite its sometimes inclement weather.
Wherever and whenever you are going, though, the risk of delay is fairly high.
Sandy Rode, a substitute teacher in Phoenix who frequently flies to Pittsburgh to visit family, said during a Monday interview at the check-in area in the Pittsburgh airport, “I almost always get through security here and then they announce an hour delay. I sit with family, have some coffee, and then as soon as I go through I get the delay.”
“I always carry books and knitting,” she said, “But [the airport’s] bookstores have benefited greatly.”
Sometimes knowing the risks is not enough.
Even Mr. Deshpande, who studies flight delays for a living, scheduled a Thanksgiving flight for Wednesday night.
“I told my wife not to expect me to be on time,” he said.