How late is your flight?

10:10 AM PT, Feb 18 2008

Those of you who fly into Vegas regularly will love what the Las Vegas Sun put up over the weekend: a searchable database on flight delays to and from Vegas. The tool seems to have been created to accompany one story on flight delays. But I think this is going to be generally useful to a lot of visitors in planning a Vegas vacation. If you have two days in Vegas, you don't want to lose one in airports when you could have planned around the issue. And, looking at the data, you will likely be delayed at some point on many round-trips to Vegas in ways that turn out to be embarrassingly predictable.

So, for example, Buffet photographer Sarah Gerke visits her family a few times a year by flying to Seattle using Alaska Airlines. There never seems to be a problem getting her to Seattle, but her return flight to Vegas is usually delayed. In fact, this result turns out not be a quirk or coincidence. Searching the Sun's data, Gerke's flight out of Vegas to Seattle is late only 8% of the time. But her return to Vegas "arrives late 53% of the time. The average delay is 39.06 minutes." Amazingly, that turns out to be not so bad. So, if you are buying plane tickets to Vegas, you definitely should know what is likely ahead for your flight.

For some of these flights, substantial delay is so normal it is shameful. In fact, the statistics are overwhelming enough on some popular flights that you should plan to be late if you buy the ticket. For example, if you were to fly Delta's flight 427 from JFK to Vegas, you should expect that it will on average be more than an hour late 81% of the time. That is right, only 19% of the time does the flight land as scheduled. Of course, Vegas is built on people who come here thinking they are going to beat the odds and be the lucky ones. They just didn't know the gambling started and the luck was needed when they bought their plane tickets. (Photo by Sarah Gerke)

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