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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
This is all very nice, but when will the public stop being treated like criminals during air travel?
Airlines that predominately do short flights (like Hawaiian does) would find it much easier to be on time than an airline that runs longer duration filghts.
Lost bags are down, not because the airlines are getting better (or the panty sniffers in TSA aren't stealing your junk) but because fewer people are checking bags because of stupidly high bag check fees.
Considering you're paying quite a bit on Airport fees, the least you can expect is for all compulsory invasive searches to be free.
I tried to explain this to my boss when he complained that I show up 14 minutes late every day.
Seriously though, why do they not simply report X percent arrived within 15 minutes of due time?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Flown lately? It sucks. It sucks so much that if you manage to get from one place to another without a *major* fiasco, you keep your mouth shut. Just because expectations have been lowered to the basement, doesn't mean things are getting better. More like passengers are just feeling more powerless and complaining less. As for on-time arrivals and all that...wow nice. Probably not as difficult, since they've gutted most routes to bare minimum and use sophisticated software to keep planes packed like sardines. Sorry, but air travel sucks and no report of marginal statistical improvement will change anybody's view on that.
This report looks at almost none of the statistics that I care about when flying. IDBs are rare enough that doubling or halving the rate doesn't matter to me, I've never been IDB'd. I rarely care if my flight is 15-20 minutes late getting to my final destination. The time to wait for checked bags, get a taxi, get through customs/immigration usually vary more than that anyways. I do get royally pissed off, though, if I have to make a connecting flight, and the later flight leaves on time when the earlier flight is late, stranding me for hours. How about some statistics on that? When a airline runs a route, say, back and forth between Chicago and Newark several times a day, if the route falls behind early in the day, instead of progressively letting the later flights run late, they'll just cancel a flight in the middle, and voila, the later flight is "on time", potentially stranding hundreds of fliers. I wonder how this situation plays out in these statistics?
I've noticed a lot of my recent flights arrive earlier than the airline predicts, even when we depart right on time. I've even had pilots tell me we are going to be early before we take off when we're slightly behind schedule. I guess I would like to see a graph of estimated flight times vs. time, and how often they are 'late' side by side, to see if the airlines are just erroneously padding predicted flight durations to get more people to their destinations 'on time.' These numbers just might mean JetBlue is the most honest airline.
What achievement did they unlock?
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.
Flown lately?
Yep, lots. I feel pretty confident in stating I likely fly far more frequently than you.
And I don't experience a "major fiasco" on any kind of a regular basis. Maybe I'm lucky, but I should be having a lot of problems to justify your comments. For reference, I'm flying out of PHL, one of the busiest airports in the U.S.
Glad you enjoy it. Most people think it sucks and has gotten worse over the years, not better. The fact that you fly more and don't hate it says more about the human ability to adapt to unpleasant situations than that flying doesn't blow. it blows, it blows more and more every year and you're nearly the only person I've ever heard, outside airline executives that doesn't agree. And if you want stats, here's a nice link http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-21/travel/customer.satisfaction.airlines.hotels_1_passenger-satisfaction-claes-fornell-american-customer-satisfaction-index?_s=PM:TRAVEL Airlines score lowest in customer satisfaction. duh.