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What the numbers mean

The data has flights, not passenger itineraries. Every connection here is a pair of real flights: an arrival and a departure at the same hub, sold by the same airline, 30 to 180 minutes apart, going somewhere other than where the arrival came from, and not flown by the same aircraft. A pair counts as missed if either flight was cancelled, the inbound was diverted, or the inbound reached the gate too late to walk to the outbound before its door closed. Airlines do not sell every one of these pairs, and they sometimes hold a departure for connecting passengers, which shows up here as an ordinary outbound delay.

The headline figure comes from the logistic model, which was slightly better calibrated on March to August 2026 than the other two estimators tested (calibration error 0.86 points, against 0.93 for cell averages and 2.05 for reading the inbound flight alone). Its inputs are the hub, airline, arrival hour, month and layover; the weekday is averaged out. The observed cell rates are shown beside it. Their intervals treat each pair as independent, which they are not (one arrival sits in up to ten pairs, and flights on the same day share weather), so the true uncertainty is wider.