Airports to Avoid at All Cost

Jan. 30, 2008 Special to ABCNEWS.com — -- Washington, D.C. - If you're sitting on the tarmac, waiting for your plane to take off in Chicago or London or Asia, take heart. Things could be much worse. You could be in Brazil.

In our tallying of the world's most delayed airports, the flight hubs in that country appeared at or near the top of our lists for both late arrivals and departures. At Brasilia International Airport, the world's worst for on-time departures, slightly less than 27% of all flights took off within 15 minutes of their scheduled departure time in 2007, according to FlightStats, a service that tracks historical and real-time flight information.

Click here to learn more about the world's most-delayed airports at our partner site, Forbes.com.

At Sao Paolo's Guarulhos and Congonhas International Airports only 41% and 43% of all flights, respectively, left on time, making them the third and fourth worst cities for departures. (Rio de Janeiro's main airport has roughly the same miserable departure reliability, though it didn't meet our criteria because of its relatively small size.) Sao Paolo is also one of the worst places in the world for arrivals. Just 54% of the flights at Congonhas and 59% of the flights at Guarulhos arrived as scheduled last year.

Brazil, of course, isn't the only country with a poor track record for flight delays. At Beijing Capital International Airport, which is expanding in preparation for the summer Olympics later this year, just 33% of its flights took off on time in 2007, putting it just behind Brasilia on our list of worst departures. Egypt's Cairo International, Africa's second busiest airport behind Johannesburg, only saw 47% of its flights take off on time last year. The average wait: 43 minutes. And at sprawling Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris--the worst place in Europe to catch a timely flight--barely 50% of its commercial passenger planes left as scheduled.

Airport authorities typically use arrival times when tracking late flights, which are considered delayed if they reach their destination at least 15 minutes behind schedule. According to conventional wisdom, pilots can make up for lost time on the ground once they're in the air. But travelers find few things more frustrating than having to wait more than necessary at their gate or on the runway. So we've included departure delays in our rankings.