Did you consider that an airline’s dominance at a particular airport could skew the results? E.g., United/AA may set the average at ORD or Southwest may set the average at MDW, reducing their normalized delay times. Perhaps in calculating the normalized delays for an airline at an airport, you could calculate the average delays excluding that airline?

So while we may board on time, but the plane may wait on the tarmac for an hour or more before clearance is given by the destination airport to depart, or if there is just a delay due to heavy traffic, etc.

This frequently happens to me leaving to go to Atlanta. So this may account for some of Comair’s poor performance.

The schedule padding is kind of a touchy subject. People don’t like to see their airline score poorly (reference the Delta pilot in the LifeHacker comments). It’s easy to say United pads their schedule and that’s cheating.

But like you said, is it cheating? If United has a padded schedule, they have to fly that padded schedule 100% of the time. Pilots are paid based on that schedule which increases costs, and also limits your ability to schedule effectively. It’s a give-and-take game that I wouldn’t call cheating at all.

I like your idea of using stage length, and might consider that for the June numbers. You’re right in suggesting that it has a factor, but I’d be willing to guess it’s a negative factor. Long flights have more time in the air to make up delays, and are less affected by the cause of most delays, the airports. Just a guess, but I’d be interested in finding out.

Worse, they can push back the flight on time even though they know there’s a ground stop, leave you sitting on the tarmac for an hour, and that flight then posts as both departing and arriving on time!

Airlines should pad their schedules based on historical wait times at different airports.

If the airline knows that at 16:00 at LAX there will be a 10-15 minute wait before they can push back, they should add this into the total flight time. When a flight is delayed, it is more important to the passenger if they are able to make their connecting flight, vs someone who will arrive at their final destination a few minutes late.

Additionally if the flight pushes back early, the pilot can extend the flight time by 5 or 10 minutes to burn less fuel. Which is becoming a bigger and bigger concern for the airlines.

The additional step you could make in the analysis is comparing delays based on stage length. HA flies a bunch of really short flights, between the islands. The only have a handful of longer stage length flights between Hawaii and the mainland, and Hawaii and their international destinations. I think you would see HA fall like a stone in the rankings.

Most of the short haul flights for the legacy carriers are flown under contract and consumers don’t realize it isn’t actually UA, DL, or AA flying the short connecting flight.

For example, since United contracts out about 2,000 (or 60 percent) of its flights to United Express carriers such as SkyWest, Mesa, etc.) what would make sense is something like:

United: x percent (combined average between all UA/UAX flights)
- United Express (combined average between all UAX carriers/flights)
- United (mainline)