Website showing flight arrival and departure histories

[rkacruiser]

Does a website exist that show a flight's arrival and departure histories? I am interested in seeing if a flight has a history of leaving on time and arriving at its destination on time or if there is a history of late departures and late arrivals.

 

Thanks for any information you can provide!

[Globaliser]

I assume you're asking about US domestic operations.

 

First, I'd caution in the same terms as would a financial adviser: Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

 

Second, any historical statistics are of dubious relevance when "a flight" is such a nebulous creature. Airline schedules, and even flight numbers for "the same flight", change with such frequency that looking up a particular flight number's history may tell you nothing about the flight that you're booked on for the future.

 

Having said all that, you might want to try searching the Airline On-Time Statistics database maintained by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

[parody]

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.

 

While mostly true, I would like to think that the first flight of the day out yesterday (for example) would generally be on time ("the past") as would the first flight out tomorrow (the "future"). Similarly, I could imagine that the last flight out yesterday would suffer a delay as would the last flight out tomorrow. As you note, changes in a flight's operations over time would need to be carefully documented in doing any historical analysis.

[Globaliser]

While mostly true, I would like to think that the first flight of the day out yesterday (for example) would generally be on time ("the past") as would the first flight out tomorrow (the "future"). Similarly, I could imagine that the last flight out yesterday would suffer a delay as would the last flight out tomorrow.

Are first flights out less delayed than last flights out? I can't see why that should be so, particularly at stations where the first flight out depends on an aircraft getting in.

[2Sisterz]

Having said all that, you might want to try searching the Airline On-Time Statistics database maintained by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

 

Interesting website. Thanks for the link. Read the stats for my airline and flight number and overall it's not a bad history!! Glad the ship doesn't leave until 10 pm as that still gives us plenty of time to make it to the ship from the airport even if our flight was delayed somewhat!!

[rkacruiser]

Thank you, Globaliser. That link is a very useful one and I have bookmarked it for future referemce.

 

I should have indicated in my posting that I am interested in an international flight's history. Specifically, Northwest Flight 70, Osaka to Detroit. My reason for my interest is trying to decide what connecting flight would be the best to reserve.

 

Again, thanks for any information anyone can provide!

[parody]

Are first flights out less delayed than last flights out? I can't see why that should be so, particularly at stations where the first flight out depends on an aircraft getting in.

 

In part this is why I said "mostly", but here is the scenario. In general, the first flight in the morning is made by the aircraft that came in last on the previous day. It really makes no difference whether that plane was on time or late as it had all night to "recover" from any schedule deviations. Of course, there will be situations where the first flight out is the same as the first flight in but this is probably not the case for large airports which have the space and facilities to keep a plane overnight. As a test of this scenario and the BTS database, I looked at flight WN 101 which departs from PVD to BWI at 6:30 am. Its average departure delay from BTS was 2.5 minutes in March. It arrived at BWI 2.34 minutes early! (This also highlighted one problem with the database, as that flight probably continues on to someplace else and those statistics are commingled in the database.) Anyway, WN 2027 is the last flight of the day leaving at 9:10 pm to BWI. Its average departure delay was 20 minutes and it arrived 13 minutes late on average. I think it illustrates the point and shows how Southwest (and probably other airlines do this too) strives to make up lost time in the air on the way to its final destination.

[Globaliser]

Without research, I suspect that you may be generally right about low fare carriers, simply because of their business model. It's a phenomenon much remarked on about Ryanair over here. But I'm not sure that the network/major carriers will show the same variation over the day - it would be interesting to see whether that's so. In part, network/major carrier schedules tend to make up any lost time during turnarounds, which are longer and more able to soak up small hold ups (many of which don't count as delays, anyway).

[parody]

It is certainly true that "low fare" carriers have less pad in their schedule and tend to turnaround aircraft quicker using their business model. In my earlier analysis I was simply trying to ascertain whether delays are a function of time of day, and thus the O-D pattern and airline should be immaterial as long as they are the same. As you say, without doing a fair amount of research it is challenging to do a stand-alone analysis between low fare and legacy carriers that is not contaminated by things like weather and works around the frequent change in flight numbers. Given this, I thought I would let BTS do the work. Based on their database (http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Oneway.asp?Display_Flag=0&Percent_Flag=0) for 3 months in 2005, BTS reports the following statistics:

 

 

12:00AM to 5:59AM = 3.46 delayed flights; 6:00AM to 6:59AM = 1.89 delayed flights; 7:00AM to 7:59AM = 2.84 delayed flights; 8:00AM to 8:59AM = 4.27 delayed flights; 9:00AM to 9:59AM = 5.18 delayed flights; 10:00AM to 10:59AM = 6.31 delayed flights; 11:00AM to 11:59AM = 7.24 delayed flights; 12:00PM to 12:59PM = 8.29 delayed flights; 1:00PM to 1:59PM = 9.27 delayed flights; 2:00PM to 2:59PM = 10.59 delayed flights; 3:00PM to 3:59PM = 11.69 delayed flights; 4:00PM to 4:59PM = 12.20 delayed flights; 5:00PM to 5:59PM = 13.90 delayed flights; 6:00PM to 6:59PM = 14.87 delayed flights; 7:00PM to 7:59PM = 15.11 delayed flights; 8:00PM to 8:59PM = 15.52 delayed flights; 9:00PM to 9:59PM = 15.28 delayed flights; 10:00PM to 10:59PM = 12.18 delayed flights; 11:00PM to 11:59PM = 10.06 delayed flights.

 

If I understand these correctly (no guarantees implied), there was an average of 1.89 flights with delayed departures between 6 and 6:59 am. The number of flights delayed increase each hour throughout the day and reach a maximum of 15.52 during the 8 pm hour. It then decreases slightly in the late evening hours as fewer flights are operating thereby reducing runway delays etc. Overall, I tend to think that this supports the notion that early morning flights are less likely to experience a delayed departure.

[Globaliser]

That's interesting, thanks. I agree that this seems to back up the hypothesis.