In honor of Nate Silver’s analysis of when to leave for the airport, and because it’s been an intense week, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on various related questions.
Buying The Ticket
As far as I can tell, the major booking portals for tickets are all basically the same. I’ve been using Orbitz for a long time because I’m used to the interface, it is clean and I have confidence it works. The times I checked Kayak and so on they all seemed to be exactly the same.
I still book tickets manually rather than using an AI agent. There isn’t much time to plausibly save and by the time I fully express preferences and enter my information anew I might as well have just done it myself. It also means I look at alternatives, which helps me keep tabs.
My heuristic is to book a little over two weeks in advance, but not to book much more in advance of that in case plans change or want to change, since in expectation price changes are pretty small and maybe you decide to stay an extra day for some reason even if you are confident you won’t cancel.
I almost always book the minimum flight, basic economy, whether or not I am paying. There is so little to be gained from moving up compared to the price. What I will pay a substantial amount for are nonstop flights since connections create bad luck surface you don’t want, flights at the right time of day so I don’t lose a bunch of sleep or work for no reason, and avoiding terrible airlines, with only minor preference between the normal options.
Terrible airlines mostly means avoiding Spirit and other ‘bargain’ options. I’ve given up on caring about frequent flier programs. I’ll still enter my information because who knows, but they’ve raised the barriers a lot and I don’t fly as often as I used to, and they frequently don’t even offer credit at all for basic economy. That last point seems like an obvious mistake by the airlines.
Planning To Spend Time At The Airport
You intentionally can spend a bunch of time at airports without spending too much time (per flight) at airports, unless that extra time is expensive for you in some fashion.
Maia: Something that the evil efficiency freaks on this place don’t understand is that spending time at the airport is fun.
Elizabeth Van Nostrand: “Should I take 5% risk of missing an irreplaceable Christmas flight, or be on my laptop in a slightly worse place for 30m?” Easy choice.
Airport time beyond that first walkaround period is not as fun or productive as time at home. It is still for the most part totally fine?
You have your laptop and your phone, if wise you have your headphones, you bring a book, you can go for a stroll, you have an excuse to relax and reset.
The bigger your buffer the more relaxing it is. Unless you are extremely pressed for time, the number of flights you should miss is essentially zero.
The food at the airport is not ideal, and it is more expensive than usual, but even if you do end up eating there so long as you have an option you don’t mind the cost in absolute terms is quite low. You should scout this ahead of time. I have notes for all the New York airports.
The reason not to spend that much time at airports, even though that time is cheap and you want to mostly never miss a flight that is expensive to miss (not all of them are), is that you don’t have to spend a full two hours to get your risk near zero.
When To Head To The Airport
Nate Silver, taker of many flights and cruncher of many numbers, tells us when we need to arrive at the airport. As he says, the standard advice of allowing 2 hours before a domestic flight makes absolutely no sense in today’s world.
Nate Silver: My default is to allocate 60 minutes — one hour, not two — from walking through the airport doors until departure time. There are several important assumptions behind this, however, which usually fit my circumstances but might not match yours:
I’m flying within the United States.
I have some form of expedited security: CLEAR, TSA PreCheck or the priority lane.
I’m not checking bags.
And there are some reasonable backups if I miss the flight, as is almost always the case since I mostly fly from New York to other major cities and have decent status on some of the big carriers.
This won’t give you much time to hang out — but it’s enough of a buffer that you’re very unlikely to miss your flight. There are more things that can add time to the baseline than subtract from it, however — so let’s consider those complications.
I, also a taker of a reasonable number of flights and a cruncher of many numbers, agree with this. One hour from arrival at the terminal is very safe in 2025 in American airports. Maybe add on a few minutes each for lack of PreCheck (more if it’s a big travel day too) and the need to check bags, but realistically no, an hour is still fine even if you are trying to maintain full peace of mind.
Maybe, as he notes, add another 15 minutes if you’re in an especially slow-to-navigate airport, or if you have kids with you or are otherwise going to move slow.
If missing the flight is an epic disaster, as in there are no backups and you lose an entire day, then you do want to allocate some extra time, but that extra time is more about guarding against delays in the commute rather than at the airport. Kids similarly should make you leave early because they add variance getting to the airport.
As we all know, the estimated travel times that Uber or Lyft shows you are often optimistic. You’re rarely going to be put in too much of a pickle in, say, Pittsburgh. But New York or Los Angeles is a different story.
So as a default, I’d round up that commute time by 30 percent if there’s a reasonable likelihood of encountering traffic.
This is the tricky part. You need to know the worst-case scenario for the trip to the airport. This is why I love taking trains to the airport, even when they are on average slower than a taxi. You have a safe upper bound of how long it takes. I agree that adding 30% is mostly safe enough for taxis, largely because the hour once you arrive also has a bunch of buffer in it.
What about international flights?
To break it down more precisely [for international travel]:
As a default, even if you think you’re fully checked in, I’d add 20 to 40 minutes to your domestic flight baseline for international travel, depending on your general experience level with flying abroad.
If you do need to visit the check-in counter, I’d add a further 15 minutes for business class and 30 minutes for coach.
And if you need to clear immigration before you take off — remember, this is not true for most destinations, but the most common exception is Canada — I’d add another 30 minutes.
If missing the flight would cause a huge inconvenience — your best friend annoyingly decided to hold a destination wedding in Buenos Aires, you’re the best man and it’s last flight of the day — you might add more time still. But this sort of situation can also apply for domestic flights, so we’ll cover these cases later.
He also emphasizes the need to consider what happens if you miss the flight. Are you out a day? Do you miss an important event? Is there a next flight?
Nate offers a handy spreadsheet for doing approximate calculations.
The two most underrated considerations are how much you like airports, which Nate Silver does take into account, and peace of mind. If you don’t mind the extra time, why not play it safe? And most of all, if you or someone you are traveling with is easily stressed about missing a flight, why not play it safer to avoid the stress? When I travel with anyone in the family, I’d much rather be a lot too early than have to cut it close even if I know I’m never actually going to miss the flight.
If you are aiming for two hours or more at the airport, then either you have something specific you actively want to do there, or you had nothing better to do, there was very large uncertainty about your trip getting there, you took the only available shuttle or ride you had available, or you are almost certainly making a mistake.
Packing Your Own Bags and Boarding the Plane
It saves you a bunch of money and time and also trouble and worry if you can move from checking bags to not checking bags, or from an overhead bags to only a backpack. Put more value on ‘moving down a tier’ on this than you might think.
If you have an overhead bag, you have to worry about them forcing you to check it. That means you have to aggressively board the plane, and sometimes that will not be enough, and you have to worry and argue about this. Also they make you pay for it. If you check a bag, there is a substantial delay that can become a considerably longer one, and the probability of your luggage being lost is nontrivial.
So consider this an excuse and opportunity to travel light.
All Aboard
If you do not need to fight for overhead bin space and are not in first class, you should consider being one of the last to board the plane. Why do you want more time in that seat instead of staying at the gate?
What Happens After The Airport
Maxwell Tabarrok asks whether air travel is getting worse. The conclusion is that typical flights now take longer, but we pad the schedules so much that flights typically arrive ‘early.’ And then we have several times as many delays of three hours or more, although the chances are still recorded as on the order of 1% (I very much press X to doubt based on my track record).
In exchange, travel has gotten cheaper in real dollars. These days I am consistently happy with the prices I get. Part of this is I am happy to fly basic economy with no checked bags and often not even an overhead bag, so I get beneficial price discrimination, and I’d want to make sure the graphs showing constant prices incorporate average actual net prices paid.
What To Do In The Air
Unless you have something urgent, focus on comparative advantage.
You have time away from it all, or when various activities are hard to do. I’ve long had a rule that I don’t seek out internet on the plane. The plane is an excuse to not have internet.
The mistake is to try to use that time to do the things that are harder to do in the air, or less fun to do, and force them to happen anyway. The other mistake is to fiddle away the time aimlessly.
The correct play is usually to take advantage of the isolation and lack of distractions. That makes some activities actively great to do. Reading books or listening to music or podcasts if you have good headphones are excellent picks.
Watching movies is common. The screen is small, but the flight is an excuse to gain the focus that is even more important to watching movies than the big screen. You also have temporary access to movies you might not have otherwise considered, which can be exciting. So contra Tyler Cowen I think this is typically only a small mistake.
Trying to sleep is of course great if you can pull it off, but be realistic and know thyself.
What about working on the plane or preparing for when you arrive?
To the extent that this is necessary to get you into the right mindset, to review information you will need, or it was impossible to do earlier? Sure, go ahead. But to the extent you can take care of it ahead of time, you want to do that.
This mostly fits with my personal experience. The part where I differ the most is this:
The way my brain works means that I find planes to be a distraction-heavy environment:
There’s loud background noise.
There are people sitting right next to me, in the zone that I would normally consider “my personal space”.
Flight attendants frequently walk down the aisle to pass out snacks or collect trash. If I can see a flight attendant coming toward me, even if they’re still 5+ minutes away, a mandatory minimum of 25% of my brain’s clock cycles are dedicated to anticipating their arrival.
I can listen to music or “light” podcasts on a plane, but I have a hard time focusing on intellectually-demanding podcasts or books or movies or work, basically anything that requires sustained attention.
For the same reason, I can’t really enjoy being at the airport because I’m anticipating that I will have to get on a plane soon. But I still tend to leave for the airport early because if I’m at home, I’m anticipating that I will have to leave for the airport soon, which isn’t any better.
Yeah, I gave up on doing anything intellectual on planes. I’m not sure if it’s the oxygen levels or something else, but I always end up feeling not-great, so at this point I just read some trashy fiction and leave the hard work for better environments.
Active noise cancellation is a huge quality of life improvement when flying.
Another thing to be aware of is that you’re not allowed to bring liquids through security, but you are allowed to bring food. I usually don’t bother, but you can bring a sandwich through security if you want to.
once, due to a huge traffic accident on the 101 that turned a sub-half-hour uber into a 1 hour 15 minute uber, i arrived at the airport about 20 minutes before departure (yes, departure, not “gate closes”). because the uber app operates on “uber time”, which is entirely unmoored from reality, this meant that the arrival time estimate slipped out 5 minutes at a time. so i went through the whole range of emotions: whew, thankfully i have an hour buffer; hmm, i’ve never arrived 40 minutes before a flight it’s going to be tight; holy shit i’m going to miss this flight with only 30 mins; holy shit even if i wasn’t going to miss the flight before i definitely am now.
(to make matters worse, not only was the flight not delayed, the departure time was changed to be 5 minutes earlier than originally planned. i didn’t even know they could do that.)
i somehow still managed to get on the flight, which departed as scheduled. still not sure that happened, but i think i learned something about how perseverance is important in the face of almost certain defeat, or something like that idk. 2⁄10 would not do again.
Could you elaborate on the “i somehow still managed to get on the flight” part? How long to get through security (in which line), and how many min before departure did boarding close?
The worst part of hearing that advice over and over again is that the rare times they are right you will still ignore them. (I once got an email from Lufthansa to that effect, ignored it as usual and proceeded to arrive at the airport one hour before takeoff as I usually do for within-Schengen flights with no luggage to check in, found out there was some kind of strike at the airport and much much slower queues than usual, and missed my flight.)
I never run into this in the US (even under-construction airports only add ~10 minutes to security lines), but I’ve had it happen a bunch in Europe. The worst was a flight from Dublin to the US, where I didn’t realize I needed to go through (slow) security plus (even slower) US passport control plus another layer of security to get onto the flight. I still made the flight but it was stressful.
Which airlines make you pay when they force you to check your bag due to running out of overhead bin space? I frequently have to check my bag intended for the overhead bin due to being among the last to board, and I’ve never been charged a fee for this.
I could never be forced to have my carry-on checked in, and was allowed to take my bag under the front seat for the simple reason that it contains several items that either should not be or are not allowed in cargo: laptop, medicine, powerbank, eyeglasses, house keys, wallet, book to read in flight and so on. I kindly ask them for a plastic bag about the size of half of my carry-on bag for these indispensables, and that closes the case.
I’m planning to write a longer post about this, but another thing to consider when picking flights is that you’re significantly less likely to get sick on a late-morning flight or early afternoon flight than a late night or extremely early morning flight (assuming you have a normal sleep schedule[1]). Your immune system is at peak for detecting and stopping infections shortly after your natural wakeup time and at its lowest sometime around when you naturally go to sleep.
Most of the research on this is in mice, and some articles say peak immunity is around the middle of your active phase, but they all agree that the middle of the night is a terrible time to be stuck in a box with a bunch of sick people.
Adjust this for your sleep cycle. If you naturally wake up at 5 am, an 8 am flight is great, but not if you naturally wake up at 10 am.
Very interesting! I’d be interested in seeing some microCOVID-style expected value estimates here. Like, approximately how much does this reduce your risk: from what to what? And how does this translate to EV? How valuable is it to avoid such illness?
My guess is that it’s only worth a few dollars at most, in which case it isn’t something I’d want to bother with. But if the benefit gets into the $25-50+ range, I’d be thinking about it for my next flight.
The short version is that the best evidence I can find suggests somewhere between 20% and 100% increased risk of infection and most likely getting more sick but I’m unsure how to quantify that.
This study on mice[1] found that:
I don’t entirely follow the details of the paper but the authors do other cell-level tests with HSV-1 and influenza A that seem to imply we should see similar results if we infected mice with them.
This study[2] (also mice) found that:
It’s not quite the same thing since this also involves circadian disruption but this study[3] finds that:
Translation: Working night shifts doubled your risk of severe COVID (similar to being a healthcare worker), and being a healthcare worker who worked night shifts put you at 7.5x the standard risk.
And this study[4] finds that:
Meaning shift workers got sick 20% more often, although I don’t like that the confidence interval just barely doesn’t include 1.
None of this evidence is amazing, but the studies all seem to at least agree on the direction of the effect.
R.S. Edgar, A. Stangherlin, A.D. Nagy, M.P. Nicoll, S. Efstathiou, J.S. O’Neill, & A.B. Reddy, Cell autonomous regulation of herpes and influenza virus infection by the circadian clock, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113 (36) 10085-10090, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1601895113 (2016).
K. Gagnidze, K.H. Hajdarovic, M. Moskalenko, I.N. Karatsoreos, B.S. McEwen, & K. Bulloch, Nuclear receptor REV-ERBα mediates circadian sensitivity to mortality in murine vesicular stomatitis virus-induced encephalitis, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113 (20) 5730-5735, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1520489113 (2016).
A.V. Rowlands, C. Gillies, Y. Chudasama, M.J. Davies, N. Islam, D.E. Kloecker, C. Lawson, M. Pareek, C. Razieh, F. Zaccardi, T. Yates, K. Khunti. Association of working shifts, inside and outside of healthcare, with risk of severe COVID-19: An observational study. medRxiv 2020.12.16.20248243; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.16.20248243
Loef, B., van Baarle, D., van der Beek, A. J., Sanders, E. A. M., Bruijning-Verhagen, P., & Proper, K. I. (2019). Shift work and respiratory infections in health-care workers. American Journal of Epidemiology, 188(3), 509-517. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwy258
Claude estimated for me a 1-in-100 to 1-in-1,000 chance of getting sick on a flight as a baseline. Let’s say 1-in-500. Ballparking the value of avoiding some sort of illness at $500, the baseline cost is $1. So then, if booking a later flight leads to a 20-100% decreased risk of illness, it doesn’t seem like it’d save more than a dollar or so in EV.
If you value avoiding illness at something higher like $5,000, then the expected savings are more like $10 or so, which maybe becomes worth it, although if you value avoiding illness that highly might be worth wearing a P100 mask or something, in which case the value of a later flight goes down to something more like $1, I’d guesstimate.
I might be unusually unlucky, but I get sick on more like 1 in 10 flights. Price-wise I don’t think middle-of-the-night flights are worth it for more mundane reasons (being awake all night has a 100% chance of ruining my next day), so for me it’s entirely about scheduling.
Assuming each sickness makes me sick for 10 days, would I rather pick a less convenient schedule or be sick for (on average) an additional 5 hours? It might depend on the trip but I usually don’t do much on my traveling-home days anyway, so it seems like I should at least travel home mid-day, even though I might be willing to travel out late to maximize vacation days (trade 5 hours of sickness for one vacation day).
I must quote the original Umeshism here:
The Umeshism I always disagreed with the most, and agreed with even less after I actually missed some flights (mostly not my fault)...
I’ve wondered if Umesh was just much richer than I, secretly a Buddha, or if the changes in the US air travel system since Umesh was presumably doing most of his travel (pre-9/11, switch from heavily regulated/subsidized direct flights with wasteful regular departures to hub-and-spoke with connections, luxury to mass affordability downplaying of travel agents, and increasing fragility/delays/cascades of failures) means that we are comparing apples and oranges here.
(In particular, I’m thinking of accounts I’ve read of how a lot of flights used to be more ‘bus’-like, where you just hopped onto whatever plane happened to be there when you bothered to stroll in, and they departed 90% empty routinely. I saw an example of this in Hawaii on the local commuter airlines where my sister missed her flight to the next island but it was no big deal because there was another leaving >90% empty in an hour anyway so she just had a snack and chatted with us as we waited for a real flight out—the sort of flight that missing has consequences like ‘missing your connection in LA’ or ‘non-refundable ticket’. If all my flights were like that, and I wasn’t “missing” occasional flights, I would agree with that Umeshism!)
I think an important consideration here is that belief updates don’t necessarily translate to peace of mind. I feel like I know a variety of people who like to get to the airport way earlier than necessary despite a logical understanding that doing so doesn’t actually reduce their risk of missing their flight a measurable amount.
I was surprised to see that you don’t include anything about talking to your fellow passengers.
Carry your laptop.
I always have excess books and movies from torrent/libgen ready for any reason.
Hm. I never aim to arrive sooner than 90minutes before departure—and that’s only because baggage drop closes 60mins before.
If without luggage, I aim for 60min, no matter whether domestic or international.
Never missed a flight yet.
Hi! I’d like to contribute to this discussion by suggesting that you
might be optimizing the wrong thing. In my experience, both airports
and airplanes actively work against you having quality time with yourself.
Let me explain, based on my Western European travel experience.
Airport seating is seldom comfortable: you typically get slightly reclined
seats, and benches where you could lie down simply don’t exist. Try
holding a laptop or book in a working position while reclining: it
requires constant effort. These spaces aren’t designed as desks for
intellectual work.
The acoustic environment is challenging too. You get essential boarding
announcements mixed with routine safety reminders, and since they sound
similar, you need to actively listen to each one to determine whether
it means you’ll miss your flight or simply that you shouldn’t leave
your bag unattended (which no one does anyway: theft is not unheard of).
The visual environment is equally overwhelming. The last airport I visited
was dimly lit: just bright enough to read. It featured huge, blazing
advertisement screens. The shop displays are also harshly lit, constantly
pulling your attention away from any book or laptop.
If you survive this ordeal and board the plane, it’s more of the same.
Modern seat pitch doesn’t allow you to unfold a laptop properly, and
the tray table is so shallow that even a book barely fits at a comfortable
reading angle. The seat width is such that an average-sized male shoulder
width barely fits, leaving no space for adjacent passengers to place
their arms. Someone inevitably has to keep their hands in their lap.
Then there’s airplane food: mostly expensive junk food that I wouldn’t
recommend unless you have an iron stomach and very low standards.
Time isn’t really the issue here. The real question is how to reach your
destination without being completely drained. There aren’t many solutions,
but when available, I’d suggest using quiet airport areas and choosing
flights with reasonable seating or selecting better seats. Both are
increasingly rare these days. If you’re fortunate enough to find them,
you might actually have a pleasant, slow journey. Otherwise, which is
usually the case, no matter how you optimize your time, the travel
experience will leave you drained and irritated.
The niceness of the environment depends on a lot on the airport. A lot of airports have added nicer seating recently. Denver actually has nicer (and quieter) seating in some sections of the normal airport than the lounges. Some other airports I’ve been to have designated quiet spaces with reclining seats (I can’t remember if this was Dublin or somewhere else).
Usually the area near where your flight is boarding will be very busy, but unless it’s absolute peak time, there will probably be unused gates that are nice and quiet. I usually rely on my phone to notify me of any important announcements and then move to the correct gate shortly before boarding. I usually can’t hear the overhead announcements clearly anyway.
I agree that planes are the worst though.
Remote seating has its own problems. On my last flight to SF, I almost missed my late-night flight out because I had (very unusually for me) found a more pleasant, quieter, empty gate to make a phone call on, out of eyeshot; and then my flight was delayed twice so the original boarding time flew past; and eventually I got so wrapped up in the call that I let the time slip until a vague nagging anxiety and had to wrench myself out and run in a panic to my actual gate—where fortunately there was still <10 minutes of boarding left. While it took at least 3 problems and I didn’t actually miss my flight in the end, it would’ve been bad because it was probably the last one out that night to SF, and it’s the first time I have ever come anywhere close to missing my flight while having actually been sitting at the gate hours before… So it was a memorable and alarming near-miss for me.