Ok, I’ll be honest with you right away. There ain’t no such thing as an early arrival, not with flying at least. Have you ever been on a flight on which they announced an early arrival at destination where that actually became a reality? And with early arrival I mean at least 15-20 minutes prior to the planned arrival time… and getting out of the airport at destination of course.
Well I didn’t. It does happen quite a lot that a flight – especially return flights from the US to Europe in my case – are shorter than planned. But since that only makes up for all the time you lost at departure to begin with that doesn’t really count does it. You’re just on time, and still that depends on how much time you lost in the first place.
Occasionally you didn’t lose time at departure and the flight is shorter than scheduled. Hooray, that makes us all happy, so what happens next? Depends on the airport I guess. Last time I flew to London City Airport we were 10 minutes early, and since that’s on a 50 minutes flight I count that as a decent early arrival. Given the early arrival, our gate wasn’t ready yet for un-boarding so we remained on the tarmac until they were able to get that one and only bus at LCY to come and pick us up. You catch my drift, by the time we got out of the airport we were later instead of sooner.
Same happened at the Brussels Airport, can’t remember where I came from – think it was Munich. We arrived too soon, but it was raining like hell when we arrived and all departures where delayed until further notice. Result, no free gate, wait for the bus, etc etc. Ugly little detail. One guy saw his luggage laying on the tarmac, in the poring rain… I guess they unloaded that a bit too quickly there. To make it even worse, that was a non-plastic one so it’s fair to say all contents were ‘damaged goods’ by now.
Anyway, let me know if you don’t agree – but I’m saying there’s no such thing as an early arrival.
Kris Hoet
missbelgium
passitalong
servantofchaos
geertd
charlesfrith
Coming back to Australia from the US recently, the captain announced that we were about an hour ahead of schedule. Unfortunately we couldn’t land until the curfew was lifted, so we circled for 30 minutes and then got stuck waiting for a taxi to the gate. In the end I got to the arrivals lounge right on scheduled time ;)
By: Gavin Heaton on July 2, 2008
at 10:11 am
Too right – there is no such thing. I was on a recent flight from Mildura to Melbourne a mere 60 minute regional flight in Australia. The pilot announced that we’d arrive 20 mins before schedule. Then we were placed in a holding pattern for 40 minutes to allow a back log of planes to land due to fog in Sydney earlier in the day.We eventually landed 15 minutes late!
By: Viv McWaters on July 3, 2008
at 11:30 am
I’ve had plenty of truly early arrivals. If you fly into or out of certain cities in the US with heavy traffic, you’ll notice that most carriers heavily pad flight times. Atlanta is a prime example of this. Delta pads flight times on their direct Albany to Atlanta flights so that even if they have to vector planes for a while until there’s an opening to land, they’ll likely have an on-time arrival. That means that if there isn’t a back up and things are running smoothly, flights arrive much earlier than estimated. On more than one occasion I’ve arrived in Atlanta 45 minutes early!
I recently saw something on CNN about a Continental flight from Newark to Dayton, OH that has a late arrival record of 93%. That flight is padded by over an hour and it STILL only manages to arrive on time 7% of the time!
By: Tara on July 3, 2008
at 1:02 pm
@Tara It’s true that some airlines ‘fight’ this problem by padding flight times, we could argue if that’s the right solution to the problem of course. Anyway I guess you’re lucky to have been on quite a few flights that arrived early… maybe I’ll get lucky one day as well, flying to Atlanta with Delta in a week so ;)
By: Kris Hoet on July 5, 2008
at 3:46 pm