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The Best And Worst Airlines, Airports And Flights, Summer 2015 Update
This article will take a 35,000-foot view of how airlines and airports have performed over the past year, according to the latest government data, which covers most domestic flights from May 2014 through April 2015. We’ll also describe how the numbers have changed since our initial release, which covered January through December 2014. (fivethirtyeight.com) More...
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There's a correlation between airport and airline performance that is not mentioned in the article. United has a hub at O'Hare, one of the worst performing airports. United's performance is impacted by O'Hare's issues, and vice versa. An indepth analysis would be required to determine the extent to which poor performance by an airport impacts an airline's performance, and vice versa.
I thought their analysis took that into account? For example, they mention Jet Blue scoring higher in their analysis compared to the government stats because they factored in Jet Blue serving many of the slower airports (such as the NYC big 3).
Don´t like articles like these very much. I mainly fly FRA-CLT and then have a connecting flight. There are good days and bad days. I do not really think that there is much difference between airlines nowadays. It is always a subjective perception.
I actually like this article (I admit, I am a numbers geek, so I'm biased). You have to think who the main consumer of stats like these are — it's not necessarily the individual traveler, but the airlines themselves, or larger businesses who have contract fares with these airlines. A 7-minute delay is not a big deal to one individual person, but multiply that times the 150+ passengers on board an average flight, and you're talking about 17.5+ man hours wasted that could have gone to more productive things. And for the business traveler, that number easily amounts to $600 or more in lost productivity, at a cost to that business (assuming a mean hourly salary of $35/hour, or $72,000/yr). If I were the CFO of a larger corporation, I would definitely take these numbers to heart.
I may not be qualified to comment on topic as specialised as this but one particular aspect hits me as important . One has to consider some other aspects also. Like the size of traffic and the growth pattern vis-a-vis the expansion of ground facilities. Ground facilities can never never be expanded at a rate synchronous with demand expansion! The reason is singular . Time scale involved in both activities. There is always a limit to be futuristic which always hindered by financial constraints . Hence to my layman's mind it is not surprising to see the two extremes being Honolulu and New York(both) . For experts , there may be many many more reasons and I'll bow to them .
Articles like this are silly. Virgin America, Jet Blu & Hawaiian are made to look real good. Try getting a business person from KMKE to KSAF, or a vacationer from KLBB to KBNA, now tell me how good these birds are. People have to chill and be a bit patient too. Don't time your trip to the minute, sit back and enjoy the view. 45-50 minutes delay that big a deal? Don't fly then take Amtrak.
