You have to staff for that, and it just makes for a hugely inefficient operation. The downside for an airline is that to schedule a 1 hour flight to take 8 hours, you have to then commit an airplane to that lengthy time. If you say a flight from LA to San Francisco is going to take 8 hours, chances are you will always arrive before schedule, even with those horrible SFO delays. See, airlines have to figure out how long to schedule a flight. Well, this illustrates the time-honored tradition of airlines padding their block times. Now all of a sudden, American has the worst performance of the big four while Southwest has the best. And if we look at the metric the Department of Transportation uses (arrivals within 14 minutes), it’s even more pronounced. This is arrivals exactly on time (or earlier), A0. But if that’s the case, then why does this next metric look so different? The best way to keep an airline running on time is to leave on time. You’ve probably cursed American for leaving the gate just as you ran, out of breath, from your late connecting flight. And sure enough, American is very good at that. As far as American is concerned, the best way to run an on-time operation is to get those airplanes off the gate at or before scheduled departure time. Let’s start with American’s favorite metric, D0. I’ll get back to them later, but kudos to them for absolutely crushing it. Their numbers were so good, it skewed the graphs and made it harder to illustrate my point clearly. This makes it easy to compare, but I must apologize to Alaska. I included both mainline and regional numbers all lumped together. To illustrate this, I dug into masFlight’s data, and narrowed it down to the big four airlines in the US (American, Delta, Southwest, and United). So who is right? It just depends on which set of numbers you think matters most. If you go beyond the legacies then Alaska and Hawaiian have legitimate claims as well. United says it was the best of the legacy carriers in February of this year. Airlines are certainly good at doing that when it comes to on-time performance. The funny thing about statistics is you can really manipulate them to say pretty much whatever you want.
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