don't book flights between 11pm-3am
Using RITA flight delay information for US domestic flights in 2008, below you can explore the relationship between average departure delay time during different time periods.
The average flight delay between US domestic flights is 9 minutes. This simple average calculation can be quite deceiving.
What if I told you that depending on a choice that you have, you can expect to wait 2 hours or even depart early?
*Note: Red bars indicate delays of more than 40 minutes.
Clearly passangers wait longer on flights scheduled to depart from 11pm to 3am. This graph provides a quick overview of the potentially best times to fly during any day of the week.
Here comes the interesting part...
*Note: Red bars indicate number of flights less than 50,000.
Surprisingly, average flight delays appear to be inversely related to the volume of flights happening in a given hour. In other words, hours with the highest number of flights also have the lowest average delay times. There seems to be one exception though, at 4am there is a relatively low volume of flights and a low average delay time.
Are there similar patterns if we look at flights by day of week?
| Legend: Color intensity | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
15 minutes |
80 minutes |
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The horizontal axis represents the hour of day, and the vertical axis the days of the week. A lighter blue (e.g. almost white) cell in the grid represent shorter average delay times (from 15 minutes) and more intense blue (e.g. deep blue) represent longer delay times (up to 75 minutes).
Not really.
Like the bar chart, here we can see that the highest average delays seem to happen between 12am-3am. There seems to be no significant difference in delays between days of week.
What about months of the year?
*Note: Red dots indicate delays of more than 9 minutes (the average)
December clearly stands out as the month with longest average flight delay, over 17 minutes. But the difference between the best and worst months is just 13 minutes, while the difference between the best and worst hour of day is a staggaring 130 minutes (at 5am there is negative time delay).
So it seems a prudent advice for the time conscious travelers to book flights between 4am and 12pm'ish'.