China Eastern's Absurdly Padded Cairo Flight

At my homeport(ICN), China Eastern is well known for having poor on time performance. Perhaps instead of restructuring their schedule they're addressing this issue by padding the flight schedules. At least it works from a PaxEx perspective.

Arriving early can be a pain. Haneda to Helsinki on Finnair is scheduled to arrive at 0440. When it’s early you are trapped in a non man’s land because transfer security doesn’t open till 0500. Nor does anything else and they seem not to turn the heating on till 5am either. I don’t understand why it’s not scheduled to arrive after the airport opens.

Another example of weird padding is Etihad's flight between AUH and KUL. Eastbound, the flight is comfortably padded. By contrast, the return flight has no padding whatsoever! Just compare EY417 and EY418.

Could that be linked to how Cairo airport charges or schedules airlines ? Is there any incentive for China Eastern to arrive on time at the airport ?
Did they get the landing slot they wanted and are they getting penalized for missing it consistently ?

Interestingly I once arrived 2 hours early on a Beijing-LA flight on American. I thought there was some sort of mistake. Those routes are long gone but AA might’ve been a little guilty of this too it seems

The BA and IB flights from MAD to LHR (seemingly in this direction only from memory) are heavily padded. They allocate 2 hours 30 mins, and on more than one occasion I've arrived more than 45 minutes early.
This was during the pandemic, so maybe that played a part.

Slots. They are based on scheduled time, not actual time. 0600 likely wasn’t available in Cairo, and a 0300 departure from PVG wouldn’t be commercially viable, so they advertise what they’re approved for (0900 arrival) and just land early.

Well, another normal day of Chinese Airlines' everyday reckless operations.

I thought they did it to pad against China's notorious ATC delays although not sure why they don't do it on every route....possibly slots related. I've taken MU from US to China pre-pandemic and it wasn't that unusual to arrive 1-2 hours early.

What does this even mean? What have you contributed to the conversation....

Is Cairo a slot constrained airport?

They either have slot allocation issues so they have to file these timings, or someone screwed up the timezones when building the schedule and nobody has pointed it out to them.

Cairo is IATA Level 2 facilitated, not Level 3 coordinated.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess it's because of potential diverted route via the dreaded "great Beijing elbow/right angle" where east-west flights to and from southern China are asked to reroute to just north east of Beijing before turning 90 degree to the west and continue their journey. It is common for European in and outbound flights. But I can't explain why the other way doesn't have it.

https://www.sohu.com/a/227447446_99997293
Here's a Chinese article about it. It doesn't really explain it well as they kept emphasis on that "it's more direct", which often times is wrong. But it does mention avoiding the Tibetan Plateau. Whether or not that's all there is is anyone's guess...

Agree with the comment about slots and it being commercially viable.

Could it have something to do with the crew compensation? What if CAI is not a prized destination and the company wanna drum more interest and increase their pay artificially by padding the schedule more than necessary, at least on the way to Egypt?

Very helpful in Simplified Chinese. Good Thing I can read it.

By the way, the image seems to show BEIJING to CAIRO.

The photo caption "Schedule padding is a standard practice" accompanies a picture of an American Airlines jet. Is this a subtle hint that American is one of the prime "offenders" of schedule padding?

The earliest this flight arrived was NOT 2hr27min, but 2hr31min. Not an important correction in any practical sense, but quite obvious 🙂