Slashdot Mirror
Annual Airline Achievement Report Released
According to an annual report by Dean Headley, a business professor at Wichita State University, flying is getting slowly better. Lost bag reports, delayed flights, service complaints and cases of getting bumped from your flight were all slightly down in 2011. From the article: "Hawaiian Airlines did the best job of arriving on time with an average of 92.8 percent, while JetBlue Airways had the worst on-time performance, 73.3 percent. A flight is considered on time if it arrives within 15 minutes of when it was originally due. Nearly half the 15 airlines improved their on-time arrival performance in 2011, and seven had an on-time arrival percentage over 80 percent — Hawaiian, Southwest Airlines, AirTran Airways, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, and Mesa Airlines. The average on-time performance for the industry was 80 percent last year, just a tad better than 2010's average of 79.8 percent."
The flight time listed for ATL-> RIC when purchasing tickets is about 90 minutes, but the time from takeoff to touchdown is only 63 minutes. They've padded the flight time to account for issues at the airport so that they can more often meet this punctuality window. For example, my flight yesterday took off 11 minutes late, and still arrived 10 minutes early.
A black hole is where God divided by 0
Its obvious that JetBlue's poor on-time performance can be tied directly to its hub being JFK, in the busiest, most congestion airspace in the country. Comparing it to Hawaiian Air for on-time performance is kinda silly. Even airlines with Chicago as a major hub (e.g. American, United), can dilute those bad performances with flights from other of their hubs, but not JetBlue whose only hub is JFK.