Aircraft turnarounds across North America and Europe ran an average of 11.1 minutes longer than scheduled in the first quarter of 2026, according to a new report from aviation technology company Assaia, with airports running AI-based monitoring cutting that gap by 36%. For an operations director juggling stand allocation and slot compliance, that is the difference between absorbing a delay quietly and watching it cascade through the rest of the day’s schedule.
Aircraft turnarounds across North America and Europe ran an average of 11.1 minutes longer than scheduled in the first quarter of 2026, Assaia’s 2026 Turnaround Report found, a gap that has now persisted for seven consecutive quarters. The study analysed more than 2 million turnarounds overall, with a detailed breakdown of 750,000 operations to track exactly where the minutes go.
The report’s most useful finding for operations teams is where delays actually start. Best- and worst-performing turnarounds look almost identical for the first 12 minutes; the split only opens up once small delays in aircraft servicing, baggage loading and departure preparation start to compound. Once a departure slot is missed, the knock-on effect can outlast the original delay many times over, a pattern that echoes the stand-pressure problems ACI World has flagged as a global capacity cost running into the trillions.
“Delays rarely begin with one obvious problem,” said Assaia chief executive Christiaan Hen. “Small amounts of time are lost across the turnaround and gradually add up, creating knock-on delays that can follow an aircraft throughout the day and impact the wider network.”
The AI comparison is the part worth a procurement meeting. Assaia measured roughly 125,000 AI-monitored turnarounds at eight major airports against 1.5 million turnarounds at 20 comparable airports without it: 7.3 minutes over schedule against 11.4 minutes, a 36% smaller gap. The report stops short of claiming the technology alone produced the improvement, but it argues real-time visibility lets ground teams catch a developing delay before it becomes a departure miss, the same logic behind platforms like Veovo’s recent integration with Overdrive IoT for airport-wide operational data.
Assaia’s turnaround monitoring sits in a growing field of operations software competing for the same budget line. SITA and ADB Safegate both offer apron and stand management tools with turnaround visibility built in, while INFORM is a specialist worth shortlisting for ground resource and turnaround scheduling that larger suites sometimes bundle as an afterthought. None of these were part of Assaia’s comparison, and the report does not claim to have tested them.
The money is where the report earns its headline. Assaia estimates turnaround overruns consume around 6% of available stand capacity at a typical large airport, and puts the cost of replacing that lost capacity with new gates at roughly $600 million, a figure the company attributes to its own 2026 analysis. Scaled across an assumed 40 million annual flights at $100 a minute, Assaia calculates eliminating the average overrun entirely would be worth up to $44 billion a year industry-wide, a theoretical ceiling rather than an achievable target.
For an airport weighing a new stand against a software contract, that $600 million comparator is the number to take into the budget meeting, in the same way Pittsburgh’s baggage system replacement was justified against the cost of working around ageing infrastructure rather than building new. The practical takeaway is narrower than Assaia’s $44 billion headline: audit where your own turnarounds lose time in the first 12 minutes, because that is the window where intervention still works, before the delay becomes someone else’s problem down the network. Full details of the study are at AviationPros.
