Flight Delays

As mentioned earlier, I go to school at the University of Southern Calfornia in Los Angeles, but am originally from Chicago, IL. On Wednesday I was finally released from school and headed to the airport to catch a direct flight from Los Angeles to Chicago. I checked out the weather before leaving for the airport to try to determine whether I would be faced with any delays. The weather looked fine, and it appeared as though a large storm would pass just in time for my flight. 

Despite my high hopes and optimistic attitude, it did not…or did it? Through my research (most of which was done with my small understanding of the color coding of the real time weather maps on weather.com) I found that the rain storm would not have affected my flight time at all—which would have arrived in Chicago at 9pm, well after the end of the storm at 7pm. Why, then, was I forced to wait in the airport for 2 hours after my departure time in order to avoid a storm which I knew didn’t exist? Because I had plenty of time (we were forced to wait on the run-way for 45 minutes, and the person I sat next to was less than fragrant) to ponder this question, I was wondering why it is that even after a storm has passed, that it is still not safe for planes to fly through. Are there remaining clouds that have not cleared after the storm? What is so unsafe about those clouds?

In addition to the aforementioned questions, I had one other large misunderstanding. Typically when flying from Los Angeles to Chicago the wind flows in your favor. As a result, it is shorter to fly from LA to Chicago. When flying from Chicago to LA, it takes an additional hour more to finish the trip, probably because the wind is no longer flowing in your favor. Regardless, it usually takes 4 hours and 30 minutes to travel from LA to Chicago. However, because our flight had already been delayed two hours and people were starting to get frustrated, the pilot told us that he would try to shave off any extra time as possible. He ended up shaving off an entire hour and a half and we arrived in Chicago in only 3 hours. He was able to reduce about 25% of the trip length! That is a lot of time when you are sitting next to the world’s largest man who just happened to forget to wear deodorant today. How is it possible that flight time can be reduced by that much? If it was possible, why can’t the airline companies reduce the total flight time in aggregate? Why does it always take 4.5 and hours to get to Chicago when this pilot could make it in 3? I would prefer shorter flights, all the time. 

All of these questions led me to wonder, what are the airline companies keeping from us? What are they not telling their customers? How quickly could a plane potentially fly across the country? Why is there such a variance in flight times? Most importantly though, why don’t the airlines tell the whole truth to their customers? When I pay $500 for a round-trip ticket, I expect some answers. Unfortunately, all of the airlines that I have flown do not provide any answers.