Arriving at an airport late at night for a relatively short overnight flight means you’re
unlikely to get much sleep. Even at the best of times, red-eye flights can leave you tired, dirty,
groggy, and unproductive the next day. But what if the times are even more extreme than normal?
Let’s take a look at some of the United States’ worst overnight flights.
Looking at US domestic flights departing between midnight and 2am and arriving between 3 and 6am,
we see that there are 126 flights in the week starting December 3rd. It varies from a mere
12 on the 8th to twice as many on the 6th. Some 25 routes are involved, reducing to 21 at
airport-pair level if airlines are stripped out. The average sector is 1,241 miles (1,996km)
with an average block time (including flight time, taxi time at both ends, and time for short delays)
of two hours and fifty-nine minutes. Twelve airports have them, and Las Vegas,
Phoenix, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Denver have the lion’s share of flights.
In our examined time period, the first ‘extreme’ red-eye service is American Airlines’ flight from
Los Angeles to Dallas, which sees an A321 that departs at six minutes past midnight and arrives
at five in the morning. The last departure is a Delta Airlines service from Anchorage to Seattle,
using a 737-900ER that leaves at 1:30 and arrives at 6:00, just making it into the list.
What is ‘worst’ is, of course, very subjective. However,
these are strong contenders based on block times. With a time of 1h 55m, Frontier’s 628-mile
(1,011km) link from Las Vegas to Denver ‘wins’ for being one of the worst flights. Note that
the exact schedule varies slightly per day, as do several of the routes shown here,
and is thus indicative only. Analyzing the data, we see that
out of the 126 flights, Frontier has almost half (46%) across 12 routes. If the airline and fellow
ultra low cost carrier Spirit are combined, they have almost six in ten flights (59%).
This makes sense as inconvenient airport time slots at strange hours of the day
are usually cheaper and easier to acquire. More ‘unusual’ red-eyes include Frontier from
Minneapolis to Orlando, and Houston and Dallas to Philadelphia. The latter leaves at 00:48
and arrives at 05:00. Looking at the 25 routes involved, here is how things divide by airline:
Frontier: 12 routes depart between 00:01 and 02:00 and arrive between 04:00 and 06:00
American has four While Spirit,
United, and Delta all each have three While airports are usually less crowded
and the traffic getting to and from airports tends to be low or non-existent,
it’s certainly an unpleasant experience to be awake when you’d normally be sleeping.
So what experiences do you have of red-eye flights? What’s the
worst late-night/early-morning service you’ve endured? Share them with us in the comments.