Within 59 seconds of time? How pedantic. no one's really fussed about 2 or 3 minutes here or there, are they?
One minute late - no. Five minutes late - yes, definitely bothered, especially if I've got a connection. So the old within ten minutes on long-distance services was too broad an allowance.
Crikey, yes, "on time" can be taken to mean anything from landing to arriving at the gate, and if they push back from the gate "on time", they can still wiat for half an hour before they actually take off.
No, airline on-time performance should be measured from "off-blocks" (i.e. doors closed, wheels turning) to "on-blocks" (at the gate, stopped). Whilst the CAA might report within 15 minutes, I used to manage punctuality stats for a major UK airline and we measured and reported true on-time (i.e. zero minutes delay), within 5, within 15, within 30, within 60 and over 60. The CAA also publishes route specific punctuality - it'd be useful to see NR reporting punctuality by route and allow passengers to drill down to that level of detail if they wanted, rather than just lumping all punctuality for a TOC together.
I don't really see where air travel fits in here, the operational challenges are very different to rail and a few minutes delay tends to be of little consequence when minimum connection times are generally 40+ minutes.
And the other thing is people expect to be able to be able to do other things within a minute or two of getting off a train, even if it's getting on another train or starting the walk to the office. With a flight, there's a general expectation that there's going to be some variable time after getting off the aeroplane clearing immigration, collecting bags, etc. So people tend to allow, and accept, a bit more leeway when travelling by air. None the less, as I said above, the airline I used to work for took on time (i.e. zero minutes delay) very seriously.
And this does not even take into account the maddening levels of padding that TOC's are allowed to put into timetables.
If "stretching" schedules (which as well as in rail is very common in air now compared to 20 years ago) results in a predictable arrival time and more consistant punctuality, I'm all for it - I'd far rather have reliable predictability in the time of arrival of my train than a promise of a few minutes faster journey which couldn't realistically be delivered on many occasions.
I think really, 10 minutes should be the minimum recommended connection time for any station; all this '7 minutes for this station, 10 miniutes for that statiion, 15 minutes for that station' is just confusing.
The other thing that would be really useful in Railway stats is the AVERAGE delay for a given service/route - again, the airline I used to work for worked out an average delay, and when schedule-planning took place it considered connection times on the basis of the average delay. A published / recommended / minimum connecting, be it rail or air, should really be based on the AVERAGE delay plus the time it's likely to take a passenger to get from one service to another and not on some arbitary number.
Andy