What exactly is the flight time?
Is it the time between the moment wheels leave the ground to time wheels touch down?
Not sure where you are seeing flight time. For airline tickets generally the listed times are estimated times from gate to gate. They tend to be amazingly accurate.
The flight time as announced by cabin crew or pilot.
I’m pretty sure that ‘departure time’ is supposed to be pushback from the gate, when the tug literally pushes the jet back away from the Jetway. ‘Arrival’ time is supposed to be arrival at the gate, probably the moment you hear the pilot finally kill the engines after reaching the Jetway. I’ve been on flights where the ground traffic at the airport has been so bad (not to mention our gate being a really long distance away from the end of the runway) that the difference between both ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ time has been over an hour! IOW we spent over an hour going from pushback to finally being number one on the runway, or from touching down to finally taxiing up to the jetbridge.
Needless to say those were not fun flights (actually missed my connection while sitting for an hour just outside our gate waiting for another plane to vacate it!) :mad:
Right - actual estimated flight time (wheels up - wheels on ground) is usually announced by the crew shortly before takeoff and they announce any ETA adjustment as the flight progresses. As mentioned, Departure/Arrival times as per the airline schedule/ticket refer to time from pushback to “until we come to a complete stop and the captain has turned off the seatbelt sign”; these times are often already padded to give the airline some margin with their on-time performance numbers vs. weather/traffic conditions. So my ticket somewhere at a given time shows D/A times something like 10 minutes over actual flying time, but some other time to some other place it may show me 30 minutes over real flight time.
Airline type …
Hail Ants & JRDelirious nailed it.
In published schedules, on web sites, etc., flight time is from leaving the gate to arriving at the gate.
On board, flight time or flying time are takeoff to touchdown.
Taxiing in & out have definite planned durations associated with them which depend on the airport, time of day, season, etc. The planned air time that goes into creating the schedule depends on aircraft type, season, typical route, and a factor for expected congestion.
The actual air time on the day of the flight will differ from the planned air time due to actual vs. typical winds and actual versus typical route. Plus a wildcard if the weather is bad enough to involve holding. We can offset some of that variance by flying fast or slow but often not all of it.
Actual taxi out times differ from planned due to runway closures, unusual winds which require operating the airport in a non-standard configuration, delays which produce bunching of the schedule later, and occasionally snafus with the final loading records & related calculations.
Taxi in deviations also include unusual airport configurations, congestion during bad weather events, and the previous flight being late out of our inbound gate.
Many gates are in cul-de-sacs which mean that even if our gate is open we can’t get past some other airplane pushing out or pulling in which is blocking our way. The same problem also happens at departure time; often when everything seems to be operating right on time leading up to departure & then we just sit there for 3-6 minutes before moving back, that’s what’s going on. Naturally some terminals are more prone to this than others.
Overall, it’s very expensive for the airline to just add padding to the schedule to improve on-time performance. A lot of science & statistics goes into deciding whether to publish a schedule where a particular flight will run over/under by 50% / 50% or 40% / 60% or 10% / 90%. Driving operational screwups out of the operation is a lot cheaper than just tacking 15 minutes onto the schedule so that even a flight which is physically late appears administratively early.
Having said that, this Fall the jetstream has been a bunch different than the historical norms. With the result that a lot of Eastbound flights have run late-ish while Westbound flights run early-ish.