Why a Six-Hour Flight Now Takes Seven

Your airline seat may not have much padding, but the airline's schedule sure does.

Delta Air Lines Flight 715 from New York to Los Angeles now takes more than seven hours to fly across the country, according to the airline's March schedule. That's an hour longer than the same flight in the same type of aircraft took in 1996. A Phoenix-Las Vegas flight at Southwest Airlines that used to be scheduled at 60 minutes now gets 80 minutes. What was once a two-hour American Airlines trip from Chicago to Newark, N.J., now is two-and-a-half hours, according to the airline's schedule.

Across the airline industry, carriers have been adding minutes to "block times"—the scheduled durations—baking delays into trips so that late flights officially arrive "on-time" and operations run better because flights pull into gates more often on schedule. Even though the recession has led airlines to cut flights and reduce congestion at many airports and in the skies, the move to pump up schedules has continued: Last year, most airlines added padding to scores of flights.

For the rest of the story: http://tinyurl.com/yf7x2pn

By: Scott McCartney at middleseat@wsj.com