Let's face it: The only instance in which passengers are thankful for a delayed flight is when they're running late. Maybe you've been there, feeling the sweat on your brow and the weight of your bags swaying behind you as you race through the terminal. Apart from the aforementioned cringeworthy instance, late flights can create more than a small nuisance.
A domino effect can be triggered, impacting all passengers on subsequent trips of a plane's schedule. For those with a brief window between two connecting flights, a delay could mean fighting for a spot in a later trip or a night spent in a hotel waiting to depart.
The team at WanderBat, a travel research site powered by Graphiq, wanted to identify the flight paths with the longest, consistent delays. To do this, they ranked all domestic flights in 2015 by their average arrival delay. For this analysis, we only looked at flight paths with above-average frequency (specifically, flight paths flown more than 1,239 times in 2015, the average for all routes).
Passengers embarking on the above 10 flight paths experience the longest delays on average. While 17 minutes might not seem alarming at first, this is a consistent average for the top three delayed flights. That means every plane that takes off on time is balanced out by one that departs more than half an hour late. Dallas/Fort Worth International to McGhee Tyson is the most delayed flight, followed by Raleigh-Durham International to LaGuardia in New York and South Bend Regional to Chicago O'Hare.
The following 100 flight paths are flown at an above-average rate and experience the longest delays.
Chicago O'Hare International to Denver International is one of the most-traveled flight paths and ranks among the top five for longest average delays. San Francisco International to Los Angeles International has far and away the most trips on this list, at 15,116 in 2015, and experiences an average delay of 10.7 minutes.
