My flight is delayed and I just watched jetBlue board and launch a later flight headed to the same destination. I will explain this injustice and an easy solution.

Sending an on-time regularly scheduled flight before a delayed flight to the same destination seems like an obvious injustice. Any first grader could explain why this is unfair. There is a basic cultural norm that says, people waiting longer should get to go first. jetBlue knows this.

So, why the cultural gaffe on jetBlue’s part? The blame actually lies with the FAA. jetBlue is making a calculated management decision.

The FAA keeps track of and publishes data about delayed flights for all major airlines. Any flight delayed more than 30 minutes (I think it’s 30) is counted and the percentage of total delayed flights is published. Obviously, fewer delayed flights is preferable.

So jetBlue is faced with a tough choice in my case. They must either (1) Send out two flights, each delayed by 1 hour, or (2) send out one flight delayed by 2 hours and one flight on-time. The cultural norm of first-come-first-served suggests option 1, while optimizing the FAA stats suggests option number 2 (since option number 2 results in just 1 delayed flight instead of 2).

Do you see how the FAA has jetBlue’s nuts in a vice here? The incentives are all wrong. I propose a simple solution (suggested to me by Arnie Barnett at MIT Sloan). Instead of counting all delayed minutes over 30 as equal, make longer delays count more. How can you do this? Simple, count the square of delayed minutes over 30.

If you do this, you quickly see that airlines are incentivized to get planes out the door as soon as possible as well as in the order that they are scheduled. Airlines would start to minimize the length of delays in addition to the number of delays.

Who is better off with the new formula for reporting delays: airlines, passengers, and the FAA. Airlines will prefer the new system because it allows them to follow cultural norms. Passengers will benefit because they will be screwed less by strange delay accounting. Finally, the FAA will be better off because people will respect their accounting more.

Photography by: jetblueflickr