Things don’t seem to be improving a whole lot at Toronto Pearson.
With the summer travel season winding down and kids heading back to school, it seems Canadians are still flying a great deal. And still getting delayed.
Using stats from flightaware.com, I tracked outbound delays at Toronto Pearson for five consecutive days, August 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28. I found cancellations are quite low, which is good news. But delays remain stubbornly high.
Here’s what I found for OUTBOUND flights, courtesy of Flight Aware.
August 24: 12 cancelled (1%). 168 delayed (27%)
August 25: 7 cancelled (1%), 223 delayed (35%).
August 26: 14 cancelled (2%), 191 delayed (32%)
August 27: 6 cancelled (1%), 168 delayed (30%).
August 28: 7 cancelled (1%), 233 delayed (39%)
If you total those up you get 46 cancellations and 985 delays over five days. If you total the percentage of delayed flights and divide by five, you get an average of 32.6, which means that pretty much one out of three flights were delayed.
(Flight Aware counts anything longer than 15 minutes as a delay, I’m told.)
The numbers are better than the consistent 40% delays we were seeing at Pearson earlier in the summer, but they’re still high.
In fairness, Pearson isn’t the only airport with problems. Vancouver International was actually worse, with a 40% delay rate, according to Flight Aware. Montreal Trudeau airport on Sunday had a delay rate of 30%, while Halifax was at 25% and Edmonton at 17%.
Federal officials have consistently stated that progress is being made at Canadian airports. The Greater Toronto Airports Authority, which runs Toronto Pearson, said earlier this month (August 5) that Canada’s busiest airport is “seeing measurable improvements in flight delays, cancellations, baggage delivery and wait times.”
In an email sent to me late this morning, GTAA spokesperson Tori Gass said things are definitely better, but that weather has been a problem.
“We’ve been tracking in the right direction with delays and cancellations for many weeks and we’re definitely seeing progress,” she said “One thing to keep in mind for this time of year is weather. Over the past two weeks (maybe even longer), we’ve had a lot of thunderstorm activity in the area which has resulted in delays as grounds crews aren’t able to work if there are lightning warnings. It’s been having a noticeable impact on flight times.
“On top of that, the weather has been impacting the whole eastern seaboard, which has meant flights can’t take off for destinations such as New York, Chicago and Boston when those airports go into ground stops or ground delays.”
Gass said that, between July 17-August 13, Pearson was fifth in the world for delayed departures. That’s better than being worst, but not so great. The stats she provided showed Montreal Trudeau was sixth worst in that period.
“We’ve been seeing that ranking fluctuate a bit between 4 and 6, but we’re confident that once we get through these thunderstorms, we should see even more improvement,” Gass said.
