Statistical guru Nate Silver — who correctly predicted an Obama win in the 2012 election when other media were calling it a toss-up — has come out with a new analysis of U.S. airline on-time data, concluding that Virgin America continues to perform better than its airline competitors, and New York LaGuardia remains at the bottom of the airport barrel for timely arrivals and departures.
Silver’s website, www.fivethirtyeight.com, crunches government data to see how airlines and airports are performing relative to their peers in on-time flights; the site offers an interactive feature where travelers can input their own plans to find out which combination of airline and airport is most likely to get them to their destination fastest.
Silver’s latest study looked at domestic airline performance from May 2014 to April 2015. For airports, he found, the timeliest flight operations were at Honolulu, Portland, San Diego, Tampa and Salt Lake City, which all benefit from relatively decent, or at least predictable, weather.
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On the bottom of the 30-largest airport rankings? “The New York metro area wins the Triple Crown of flight delays,” Silver writes, “with LaGuardia, JFK and Newark ranking as the three slowest major airports, in that order. Chicago O’Hare is the fourth-worst, while Philadelphia is fifth from the bottom.” He notes that performance at New York JFK could get worse this summer due to ongoing runway work there.
Individual airline performance was topped by Virgin America, which also ranked first in Silver’s first analysis of flight delays several months ago. Alaska and Delta ranked second and third, while United once again occupied the basement. United “has at least been marginally better so far in 2015 than in 2014, costing travelers three minutes per segment instead of six. But when you’re flying more than a million flights a year, it can take some time to change course,” Silver observed.
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Yesterday’s “Middle Seat” column by Scott McCartney in the Wall Street Journal presented a table of not-on-time rates for 1910 city pairs. “Not-on-time” comprises delays, cancelations, and diversions. The results for a city pair include all airlines flying a route. O’Hare is part of 9 of the 10 worst results, with Denver to Aspen filling the other slot. Some airline websites, including United, enable you to check the on-time record for a flight before you book it. This is useful information for planning.
Thanks, Jim!
Here’s what Nate Silver said about that: “In our method, airlines can’t cheat by padding their schedules and ‘beating’ an unrealistically long flight time. Instead, we compare their
actual travel times against other airlines on the same routes.”
Interesting, but these tables are averaging a lot of data into great blurry blobs. It would be more interesting to see, for each airline, the percentage of all flights that depart more than 15 minutes late, and of those flights the average delay.
As BlueLion says, I wonder how many airlines pad their flight times to yield a higher number of on-time arrivals. The travelmath.com web site shows the flying time from San Francisco to Las Vegas is 1 hour 6 mins, but every itinerary I’ve flown lately shows a gate-to-gate time of 1 hour 30 minutes, even for early-morning flights that zip right out to the runway and take off.
Regarding the airlines, how many padded their schedule so they would look better?