Getting home for Thanksgiving....
when your flight’s a turkey!
Around this time of year there are always plenty of stories about how busy US air travel is around Thanksgiving and the problems associated with flights that don’t run to schedule. Some of those stories are myths and some of the problems are no more than the sort of disruption caused by the variability of normal weather patterns. According to OAG’s Schedules Analyser, the busiest day for air travel in the Thanksgiving holiday is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, but Sunday 1st December will only be the 24th busiest day of the year in terms of the total number of domestic airplane seats in the air. And Thanksgiving is the quietest day of the year for domestic air services.
One of the myths is that there are more flight delays around Thanksgiving than at other times. Looking at the on-time performance of flights departing from the 25 US airports with the highest number of domestic air services, it is apparent that this is not always so.