With Some Exceptions, Airline On-Time Performance Improves in January
Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:14:27 PM

If you're travelling from Newark to Cincinnati you may want to avoid Delta flight # 6808. This particular flight was late a whopping 95.7% of the time in January, easily the worst performance of any scheduled flight.

Still, for the month, airline on-time performance generally improved, according to government data released today. Baggage handling also improved, and there were fewer flight cancellations than the same period one year ago.

Overall, 77% of flights arrived on-time in January (up from 72.4% a year earlier), there were 5.2 bags mishandled for every 1000 (down from 7.39), and 2.3% of flights were canceled (down from 2.9%).

Hawaiian Airlines reported the best on-time performance, 90.82%, but with a small number of flights and consistently great weather, that's not much of a surprise. Of the major airlines, Southwest came out on top at 83.30%. And of the large network carriers United was best at 79.04%, followed by Delta at 77.56% (flight 6808 notwithstanding).

Here are the complete rankings:

Hawaiian 90.82

Southwest 83.30

ExpressJet 79.80

United 79.04

Pinnacle 77.93

Delta 77.56

Continental 77.43

AirTran 77.39

US Airways 77.34

Northwest 76.40

Frontier 76.32

SkyWest 76.30

American 75.47

Mesa 75.45

JetBlue 74.92

American Eagle 72.04

Alaska 71.51

Atlantic Southeast 68.30

Comair 56.75

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