Customs Info update
One thing the CBP guys do very well is keep their statistics up to date, they actually update about 3 working days behind the actual day, which is awesome and has allowed me to pull the numbers for Jan 2017.
As it's a new year, I've updated the formatting, so you can now see (for Mth and YTD) 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
What will this info tell you I hear you ask, well actually it's a bit of a window into the performance of Terminal E and how well we treat our incoming folks from the International flights. It's not all passengers by any means but it does give us an idea of what's going on in a more up to date fashion than Massport or T-100.
In future reports I'll focus on the YTD and 12 month rolling, but as this is the first blog post on the subject, i'll stick with the Jan 17 info so you can follow your way around the numbers. This file has been around for a while, but with the updates there's a bit more to it. Like all my regular reports, I analyze by Month, YTD, 12 month rolling and calendar year. The hours shown are the timings of when flights landed and their resulting calculations, NOT the hours when people went through the line. So 1200-1300 means a flight landed during that period and if a person falls into the 121+ category, it means it took them more than 2 hours after the flight landed to be processed.
Section 1
So the top section of the reports (link at the bottom of this post) is the high level summary data, with numbers of passengers counted, total flights, average flights counted and average number of custom booths in use during each hour and each hour is listed.
Section 2
Middle section shows Average Wait times and Maximum Wait times (i.e. the longest time someone had to wait after their flight landed to be processed)
Section 3
Bottom section shows how the processing went by timing category, I have color coded them to make it a little easier when navigating as google docs on the site won't allow me to freeze panes which is annoying) , 0-30 Green, 31-60 yellow (ok), 61-120 (orangey/red (absolute red sucks as a color choice), 121+ grey ( i wanted to use black, but that sucked too..), clearly you want to be in the green.
So enough explanation, what does this all mean for Jan 17.
Well for a start 14.8% more passengers went through year over year on 9.9% more flights (top section). number of booths dropped slightly, so i don't know if that was down to better efficiency or staffing.
Having said that, the middle section is rather telling on that front, average wait time overall went up 4 minutes, well that's not much i hear you cry, no, in literal terms it's not, but in reality, it's 25%, which isn't good. the biggest increase effectively was in the 1400-1500 block, although a couple of others had bigger gains, they are outside peak period, so staffing at those time could be more problematic, but we all know the 1400 block is a peak time and to see that average go up is a little alarming i must say and some big increases in the max wait time to boot..
Now you've digested that, we move on to the bottom section, where the above truly becomes clear, Jan 17 was a bit of a mess overall. The last couple of years have seen movement to the left. I.e wait times getting shorter and 80% of folks getting through in 30 minutes or less. Big reversal in Jan 17, 10% less in the green 0-30 band, almost 7% uplift in the 31-60, but the 61-120 category now captured over 7% of the overall total. That's 3.4% more captured in that category, but represents a doubling in total pax in that category year over year.
Fortunately CBP produce their numbers hour by hour day by day, so you can zero in on when the problem occurred. In this month the worst offender was 1/2 with 537 over 91 minutes and 140 over 121+, followed by 1/8 with 264 over 91+ and 14 of those over 121+.
Now obviously Jan could be a blip as it's only one month and next months post will analyze YTD and rolling trends a bit more, but 1/2 was definitely NOT the day to be flying back to BOS that's for sure.
As I said, the link is below, enjoy and until next month.
http://awhitelocks.wixsite.com/newenglandaero/cbp-throughput