In a separate post, I shared some thoughts on our China Airlines A350 business class flight from Phoenix (PHX) to Taipei (TPE). In this post, I’d like to discuss one other thing about the flight that was remarkable — just how early we arrived!
Airlines often add a bit of padding to their schedule, since they don’t want to be late, both for the purposes of having good on-time statistics, and also in order to run a reliable operation, and minimize the number of people missing connections.
Anyway, our Phoenix to Taipei flight had a scheduled block time of 15hr20min. I was a bit surprised when we boarded, and the captain announced that our flight time would be 13hr50min, a full 90 minutes shorter than the scheduled block time. Okay, there’s always things that can go wrong, so I wondered if we’d actually make such good time.
A great solo travel tip spotted this week on One Mile at a Time.


