Did the Internet Make Short Airline Flights Longer?

The icing on the cesspool that is air travel circa 2014 (American edition) is that it's not even fast anymore. Sure, it's faster than its competition, but the competition is a rail system-qua-punchline forced to pad already slow long-distance schedules with extra hours of travel time to account for oil train traffic jams. Oh, and the bus. Have you taken a Greyhound cross-country? So, yeah, that's the state of things: prolonged misery on every front.

On the air travel front, there's all the bonus time spent dealing with security and luggage scans and whatever new thing there is by the time you read this, but actual travel times are getting longer too, like from airport A to airport B. This effect is described in a new paper in the The Review of Economics and Statistics, which describes the increased times as an intentional cost-cutting move on the parts of airlines.

That's itself a function of a large-scale change in emphasis from timeliness to cheapness—a shift that neatly correlates to the growth in online ticket sales and internet access in general.

The work comes courtesy of Dr. Itai Ater, of Tel Aviv University's Recanati Business School, who used statistical data drawn from the US Bureau of Transportation along with data from the Computer Use and Ownership Supplement to the Consumer Population Survey, which describes the geographical growth of internet usage from 1997 to 2007. During that period, the percentage of airline tickets booked online directly by consumers (as opposed to through travel agencies, which used to be a real thing normal people used) increased from 0.5 percent to some 50 percent, while overall internet usage went up from 19 percent to 76 percent.

"While I was studying at Stanford from 2003 to 2008, I was interested in understanding why the length of 'red eye' flights between San Francisco and New York had increased from five hours and 20 minutes to five hours and 40 minutes," said Ater in a TAU statement. "It became clear, after examining flight data, that planes were flying at higher altitudes to cut fuel costs—there is less friction at higher altitudes—and thus required more time to land. But the question remained: Why? Why were airlines cutting costs at the expense of time?"

I'd say Ater's conclusion is fairly open to debate—it's perhaps a bit of a leap—but it's an interesting observation nonetheless:

"In the early 1990s, when travel agencies sold over 80 percent of airline tickets, flights typically appeared on the travel agent's screen in ascending order according to their scheduled durations," he said. "Given that travel agents booked over 80 percent of flights from the first screen and that the majority of the tickets were sold from the first line of search results, airlines had strong incentives to maintain short scheduled flying times. This incentive changed as the internet became the most common channel for purchasing airline tickets, and flight duration was no longer the main criterion to sort flights."

That's fine, but here's the thing with correlations …

The graph above is of oil prices and, as you can see, the increase between '97 and '07 follows a similar trajectory to the increase in internet access. And the relationship between fuel price pressures and fuel saving efforts is not even a thing that needs a leap of any sort; airlines' efforts to match the persistent fuel price increases of recent years are well-documented.

Here's another telling chart, from a report by the International Council on Clean Transport:

Fuel efficiency isn't consistent across airlines and, what's more, it would seem that the more internet sales-geared airlines, the budget carriers Southwest and Frontier, are firmly in the middle of the pack, rather than way out in front as we might expect from an airline category whose veryraison d'être is price competition.

"We do control for oil prices but the internet still has a significant impact on flight times," Ater told me. "Intuitively, the idea is that the increase in oil prices was similar for all flights in a given day. However, we find that the change in flight times was greater for flights that carry more passengers with internet access than flights that carry fewer passengers with internet access."

"For instance, though the change in oil prices was similar, at least for same carrier flights, the increase in flight times for flights departing from San Francisco was greater than the corresponding increase in flight times for flights from Albuquerque," he said.

The difference in that case, where fuel prices remain constant and rates of internet access change, may boil down to web price wars. But perhaps don't blame the internet entirely: the usual stuff still matters.