Flight Times – Hope your flight is on time.
Flight times are actually a good deal more complex than that now: not only does the traveler want to know when the plane takes off, but they also want real time flight following, which assures the traveler that the flight will be en route and arriving at the time when it is expected to land. In particularly large airports, flight times are more difficult to forecast without special software. Heathrow flight times are very complex, as the airport is spread across miles of the English countryside and there are few ways to predict when the airplane will get to the beginning of the runway for takeoff, and what the taxi time might be, particularly during the heavy travel times of the day. British Airways has developed a better way to predict flight times by using special software, which takes into account the expected traffic on the ground and in the air during departure and arrival times, and even accounts for the distance from the end of the runway to the gate. This amazing tool is also able to predict how many planes might be in line for takeoff—an important factor for schedules as planes can sometimes sit on the ground for 30 minutes or more waiting to take off, and the schedule can be severely affected.
Flight travel times are therefore multifactorial. The simplest flight time to predict is from leaving the ground to touching down at the destination airport. More difficult is knowing how much time will be taken up by the plane from the time that it leaves the gate until it gets through the taxi morass to when it is able to take off. This depends on the time of day, as many planes are scheduled to leave at 5 or 6 pm, while few planes are scheduled to leave late at night. It’s therefore probable that the late afternoon departure will take a lot more taxi time than the late-at-night departure, when few planes are expected on the taxiway.
Select your outbound flight time by using British Airways’ special software. All you need to do when you are flying from Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle airport, for example, is to access the BA site, put in the fact that you are planning to travel on a certain flight at a certain time, and the ‘scheduled’ and ‘actual predicted’ schedules will be given. Use the ‘actual’ times in order to best predict you landing and true arrival time.