The Department of Transportation regularly tracks airline performance metrics, one of which is timeliness. The June 2016 metrics just came out, and the most punctual airline June 2016 edition is Hawaiian Airlines. This is not surprising really, as most of Hawaiian flights are operated within Hawaii. And of course Hawaii doesn’t suffer from sever weather like the rest of the U.S. does. This is especially true during the winter months, as Hawaii doesn’t have snow.
The data did say that Hawaiian’s flights were on-time 91.1% of the time. That does surprise me somewhat since at least 50% of the flights I’ve taken on Hawaiian over the past two years (which admittedly has only been 8 segments) were delayed by over 30 minutes. Perhaps I’m just unlucky?
The 2nd most punctual airline in June 2016 was Alaska Airlines, at 86.4% on-time performance. SkyWest came in third at 84.6%, followed by Delta at 83.4%, and United at 79.2%. What surprised me most with the list, however, was American coming in DEAD LAST. American’s on-time performance came in at 72.4%, and this is despite American’s dumb new policy of leaving the gate before the scheduled departure time. Oh, and their padding their schedule. Not trying to hate on American, but I do wonder what the heck is going on at American. I mean, their on-time performance was worst than Spirit!
The second worst performer was Virgin America. That also surprised me a bit. I’ve never flown Virgin America, but I was under the impression that they generally had good on-time performance. I guess their having their primary hub at SFO doesn’t help their performance, but still. It’ll be interesting to see how Alaska deals with this post merger, as Alaska consistently rates in the top 3 for most punctual airline. But we’ll have to wait and see!
AA has been terrible for me recently. I had countless flights sit on the ground because of a lack of a gate or “traffic around the gate”. These have been 30+ delays (DCA or LAX). I switched from UA to AA a few years ago and man I really miss UA. I can count the number of times in 500k miles on UA that I have been delayed due to non-weather events. It’s happened to me on AA on at least the past 50% of my flights. Their ops department sucks.
That’s really disappointing to hear, A. It seems like they’ve only gotten worst since their merger, which doesn’t actually surprise me, but I wish it weren’t so.