There are a lot of factors that can influence the quality of your experience of flying on a commercial airline. But what are the big ones that have the most impact on how passengers judge how good their flying experience is?
Back in 2015, the flight booking company Skyscanner surveyed 2,000 international passengers to find out what they felt mattered most. They identified three big things affected how passengers evaluated the quality of their flight:
- Time of Day for Departure. This factor is important because it directly affects the things you can do either before or after your flight.
- Seat Pitch (or Legroom). This factor directly affects how physically comfortable you can expect to be on your flight. As a general rule, the more you have, the more likely you will be comfortable.
- Punctuality at Arrival. Keeping in mind that the whole point of flying is to get where you're going, getting there on time is almost just as big a deal, because it affects how everything you plan to do after you get to your destination will actually happen. Or doesn't happen, as might be the case if your flight is excessively delayed.
But Skyscanner took it to the next level. They worked with a statistician at the University of Sheffield to create a formula that you can use to find out, before you fly, how good your flight is likely to be. And we've taken that math and built the following tool you can use when planning your next flight!
Just enter the indicated information, following the links we've provided to get it if you don't have it handy, click the "Calculate" button and the tool will do the rest. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click through to our site to access a working version.
We've set two of the three defaults for options that will likely result in a good flying experience for you, and one that won't. The one that probably won't is the seat pitch, which we set at a value that's consistent with what you'll find in "Economy" class.
As for the Potential Flight Quality Score, here's the decoder ring for interpreting the tool's results:
- 10 or less: Not good
- 10 to 14: Okay
- 14 or more: Good
Playing with the various options, we found it surprising at how much the seat pitch influences the tool's results. Most combinations we tried with typical seat pitch dimensions result in flights that most passengers would not describe as either good or okay. Which if you think about it, is pretty consistent with what most passengers experience when they fly today.
Image credit: Black leather airplane seats photo by Douglas O on Unsplash.