No, it’s not a slow news day, I’m just genuinely curious if anyone has an explanation…
It’s normal for airlines to pad schedules
Let me start by acknowledging that it’s standard practice for airlines to add a bit of a buffer to their flight schedules. After all, the “block time” for a flight doesn’t just account for how long the flight actually is, but also for the taxi time, and a bit of leeway in the event that there’s a delay.
Some airlines are known for padding their schedules more than others, in order to artificially improve their on-time performance. Furthermore, with airlines having banked hubs and short minimum connection times, padding schedules helps to ensure that as few people as possible misconnect.
Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where you’re way ahead of schedule. On a transcon flight, maybe your flight pushes back a few minutes early, there’s no wait for takeoff, winds are favorable, and there are no ATC delays, and you might arrive 30 minutes early.
On long haul flights, it’s possible to arrive even more ahead of schedule than that. I remember one particular transpacific flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles many years ago, where we arrived two hours early. As the captain described it, we had the shortest flight time on the route he had ever seen, due to very strong tailwinds.
All that being said, I’ve never quite seen schedule padding like this…
China Eastern’s strange Shanghai to Cairo flight
China Eastern currently operates a 3x weekly flight between Shanghai (PVG) and Cairo (CAI) using an Airbus A350-900. The 5,209-mile flight has the following schedule:
MU223 Shanghai to Cairo departing 12:30AM arriving 9:00AM
MU224 Cairo to Shanghai departing 2:30PM arriving 5:50AM (+1 day)
The flight is blocked at a staggering 13hr30min westbound and 10hr20min eastbound. Now, that amount of block time difference between directions wouldn’t be unusual for a route over the Pacific, where winds can be very strong. But the winds aren’t nearly as strong over China and Kazakhstan, where this flight spends most of its time.
Pulling up the Flightradar24 data over the past month, it’s astounding how early this flight has consistently arrived. During this period:
- The earliest this flight arrived was 2hr27min ahead of schedule
- The latest this flight arrived was 1hr21min ahead of schedule
Look, I track flights all day every day for fun, and I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen another route where the flight always arrives over an hour ahead of schedule.
I love to learn in these situations, so I’m curious, can anyone make sense of China Eastern’s scheduling here?
- A block time of 13hr30min for a 5,200-mile flight in a region of the world without strong winds seems extreme, so what was the airline thinking in the first place by scheduling it like this?
- China Eastern blocks its Shanghai to London flight nearly an hour shorter than this, even though the actual flight time is roughly an hour longer
- I suppose on some level, perhaps this over padding doesn’t matter, because rarely are people upset when they arrive at their destination early (though if you’re being picked up, there’s a difference between a 9AM flight arrival and a pre-7AM flight arrival)
Bottom line
While most airlines do some schedule padding, I’ve never seen anything like China Eastern’s Shanghai to Cairo flight, which regularly arrives over two hours ahead of schedule. The flight has a significantly longer block time than longer routes operated by the airline in the same direction, like Shanghai to London.
Can anyone make sense of China Eastern’s excessive schedule padding on the Cairo flight?
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