Hawaiian Airlines Posts Best Performance; Worst, Comair

The on-time performance of the nation’s largest airlines improved in 2008 compared to the previous year, according to the Air Travel Consumer Report released Monday by the US Department of Transportation (DOT).  

According to information filed by 19 participating airlines with the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), those carriers posted an overall on-time arrival rate of 76.0 percent for January through December 2008, up from 2007’s 73.4 percent rate. During December 2008, the carriers posted an on-time performance rate of 65.3 percent, up from December 2007’s 64.3 percent but down from November 2008’s 83.3 percent.

As far as the performance of individual carriers, Hawaiian Airlines posted the best YTD on-time figure for 2008, with 79.6 percent of all flights arriving within 15 minutes of scheduled times. Impressively, US Airways and American rounded out the top three, at 72.1 percent and 69.9 percent, respectively. Those carriers had previously posted some of the worst on-time figures.

The dubious "honor" of worst-performing airline for 2008 belongs to Delta regional operator Comair, with a mere 55.1 percent of its flights arriving on-time. Alaska Airlines was the second-worst, at 58.4 percent, while AAL's regional operator American Eagle posted a third-worst percentage of 59.3... hence demonstrating at least one reason why mainline carriers report their figures separate from their subsidiaries.

The consumer report includes BTS data on the number of domestic flights canceled by the reporting carriers. In December, the carriers canceled 3.3 percent of their scheduled domestic flights, down from the 3.5 percent cancellation rate of December 2007 but higher than the 0.8 percent rate posted in November 2008. American Eagle cancelled the most flights in 2008, while Frontier cancelled the fewest.

When it came to strandings on the tarmac, in December Continental Airlines and regional operator ExpressJet posted the worst performances, with three mainline and two regional flights left on the ramp for as long as 429 minutes -- over seven hours. All those flights originated from Houston on December 10, as the city was pounded by a freak snowstorm.

Overall, carriers filing on-time performance data reported .0003 percent of their scheduled flights had tarmac delays of three hours or more, up from .00002 percent in November. BTS says it is still reviewing other parts of the tarmac data reported by carriers for October through December, after errors were revealed in some data points, as ANN reported.

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