Airlines are in the transportation business, the same as trucks, trains, busses, and the like, of which, travelers have a known time when they need to be at the airport gate, and are given a known time of when they will be scheduled to arrive at their destination. The thing about airline travel is that airlines are permitted to “pad” their arrival time, so that they can add extra minutes onto their arrival time, to take in various contingencies, fairly or not, which thereupon allows these same airlines to brag about their on-time arrival performance, and/or to impress flight passengers that despite leaving late, for instance, that the plane arrived early at its destination.
None of the above is truly fair to passengers, because, in short, arrival times have been “gamed” by the airlines. Quite frankly this should be better regulated, so that there is a firm and fixed rule that airlines must adhere to, when calculating their arrival time, as opposed to different airlines, padding their arrival time, by different amounts. The bottom line is that people who travel, want to know the true scheduled time that they will most likely arrive at their destination, and because passengers are required to adhere to the airline’s rules for an on-time departure, of which, the failure of passengers to do so, results in them often missing their flight, it would seem only reasonable that airlines should have to honestly display their true arrival time, without an excessive amount of fudging or just plain deception.
The most annoying thing about flights supposedly arriving early or on time, is the apparent pride displayed by the pilot, as if, that pilot through their particular skillset somehow was able to get the airline that departed late to get to its destination on time, after all. In truth, though, the airline has padded the arrival time so much that departing from the gate at a time even reasonably close to its scheduled departure time does readily make for an on-time arrival. Indeed, it would be one thing if pilots actually sped the plane up to a higher speed or took a faster route to arrive at the destination sooner, but that isn’t typically the case, though it seems to be what pilots are implying when they insinuate it was their piloting that permitted the plane to arrive on-time or to be early.
In sum, this type of gamesmanship by the airline industry should be regulated out of existence, or, if not, there should be full disclosure to all passengers, that the arrival times for airlines have been padded, and it should be clearly displayed how much they have been padded, because as it stands right now, the arrival times are deceptively longer than they should be, basically because airlines want to improve their on-time arrivals to make it seem as if they really are on time, when in actuality, by any real measure of the tape, they aren’t nearly as good at arriving on time as they claim to be.