Things in the Sky

Yesterday, the monthly Air Travel Consumer Report came out, and I noticed a few things. Here they are, in no particular order.

For all the carriers reporting, on-time performance went up compared to a year ago. The on-time percentage for March 2008 was 71.6%, and 78.4% in March 2009.

Delta had the most flights that were stuck on the ground for more than four hours. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that a storm in early March was the culprit. But the newspaper also points out that AirTran didn’t have any flights delayed that long from Atlanta.

As Brett Snyder has mentioned in the past, it looks like Hawaiian is still having some issues with mainland flights. For example, the airline’s flights arriving into SFO arrived on time only 45% of the time. When only mainland flights are considered, the airline’s achieved a low on-time percentage of 58% (better than the 50% on-time percentage that Brett reported earlier, but still pretty bad). The number jumps up to 91.5% when the interisland operation is put into the equation, so Hawaiian can still claim it has the best on-time performance in the industry.

In terms of mishandled baggage – here’s a list of all the carriers, ranked by reports of mishandled baggage per 1,000 customers for March 2009. I also list the change in complaints compared to March 2008. All of the carriers improved, and I still think its fair to say that this is one positive side effect of checked luggage fees.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that the report noted that Southwest had updated its 2008 numbers, so I asked them about it. Southwest spokeswoman Paula Berg (one of the best airline PR reps in the business, in my opinion) had an extremely-detailed answer for me less than an hour after I sent her my question (yes, I am looking at you, airlines that don’t seem to respect bloggers ):

…all carriers are required to report operating stats to the DOT. As part of an ongoing effort to ensure the accuracy of the information we report, we initiated a review of our 2008 numbers. The findings confirmed the accuracy of the majority of our reporting, but we found some small errors in our baggage numbers – not intentional, of course, but rather the result of human error.

Specifically, there were some coding and formula errors relating to the number of baggage reports taken and the number of Nonrevenue Customers boarded. The correct numbers would not have altered the DOT’s monthly baggage-handling rankings during 2008 except for March (lowering Southwest’s rank from 7th to 8th place) and July (lowering our rank from 5th to 6th place).

OK, that makes sense. Many thanks to Paula for such a prompt and informative reply.

And now…time for me to hop on a bus to get to work!