The latest travel approvals (TA's) came in last week, and the Roll Call at the WCC list was updated accordingly. I ran the latest statistics on the wait for TA. Here's a graph with the number of days waited on the x axis, and the number of families falling into a particular wait time on the y axis. Again, this only includes families in our situation (dossier sent to China after the letter of intent). (Click on the graph to enlarge)




The average wait time is up to 82 days, with a standard deviation of about three weeks on either side. You are most likely to get TA within one standard deviation of the mean (in other words, within 3 weeks on either side of the average wait). I so wish that the standard deviation was smaller - it would be nice to have a tighter estimate, rather than the 6-week window of highest probability.


Here's further breakdown of the numbers, along with TA estimates based upon our own LID:

7% of families received their TA in less than 60 days after their log-in date (for us, that would be before Jan 12)
16% < 65 days (before Jan. 17th)
23% < 70 days (before Jan. 22nd)
37% < 75 days (before Jan. 27th)
51% < 80 days (before Feb. 1st)
71% < 85 days (before Feb. 6th)
76% < 90 days (before Feb. 11th)
80% < 95 days (before Feb. 16th)
87% < 100 days (before Feb. 21st)
90% < 105 days (before Feb. 26th)

Less than 10% of the families had to wait more than 110 days for their TA. Looking at the graph, it still seems most likely that we'll receive our TA sometime between February 1st and February 6th.

Still, there are those families that seem to have to wait a really long time. I plotted LID against TA on a scatterplot to look at this relationship. The diagonal line represents the average wait time. The closer a given point is to the line, the closer a particular family is to waiting the average amount of time. If a dot is above the line, the wait was longer than average, if below the line, it was shorter than average. (Click on graph to enlarge)




You can see that when it's been a while between TA's coming out of the CCAA, that there's more catch-up, and there are more points above the line. (For instance, there wasn't much coming out during October of this year, so November had more of the earlier LID's included). Still, it's encouraging to see the clusters around the average time; waiting longer seems to be fairly uncommon.

I wouldn't mind waiting until March to travel; it's certainly what would work best for our family schedule. On the other hand, it would be wonderful to have Eleanor join our family ASAP! Guess we'll see!