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Summer flight delays: What are the odds?

Your chances of a summer flight delay are much greater at some airports than others. (Image: Jim Glab)

Your chances of a summer flight delay are much greater at some airports than others. (Image: Jim Glab)

It’s bad enough that travelers have to wait in extra-long security checkpoint lines this summer. But there’s a good chance they’ll encounter flight delays as well – although the odds of that happening vary considerably from one airport to another.

The website MileCards.com examined government data on airlines’ on-time performance at the nation’s 50 busiest airports during the summer months over the years 2010-2015 and concluded that your flight is least likely to arrive on time if you fly into Newark or San Francisco this summer.

Those two airports had a summer on-time flight arrival rate of just 68.4 percent. By contrast, the on-time arrival rate for Honolulu – the number-one ranked airport – was 86.4 percent, followed by Salt Lake City at 86.2 percent and Seattle and 83.1 percent.

The study determined that June is the worst month for flight delays, with an overall on-time arrival rate of 75.4 percent during the six-year study period. (That’s even worse than January at 77.4 percent.) The best month for on-time flight operations was September, with an on-time rate of 83.9 percent.

According to MileCards.com, the problem at San Francisco is fog delays, while flights at Newark must contend with congestion and summer thunderstorms. Speaking of Newark, three of the five worst airports for summer delays were in the New York area: The on-time arrival rate over the six-year study period was 70.3 percent at LaGuardia and 73.4 percent at JFK. (The other airport in the top five worst for summer delays was Chicago O’Hare at 72.7 percent.)

Source: MileCards.com

Source: MileCards.com

Other sources of frustration for summer travelers are long waits to take off once you’ve boarded, and delays in getting to the arrival gate after the plane has landed.

MileCards.com said that four of the five airports with the longest waits to take off were in the northeast: New York JFK was the worst, with an average taxi-out time of 29.8 minutes, followed by LaGuardia (28.0 minutes), Philadelphia (23.5) and Newark (22.6). The fifth was Atlanta, with a wait time of 20.1 minutes.

On the other end of the trip, there were five airports that showed average taxi-in times to the gate that exceeded 10 minutes. They were Los Angeles (10.7 minutes), Chicago O’Hare (10.5), Dallas/Ft. Worth (10.5), Atlanta (10.0) and JFK (10.0).

MileCards.com created what it calls a “Misery Score” for each airport using a formula that combines all three of the above rankings. Newark won the title of “most miserable airport for summer travel” with a Misery Score of 95, followed by LGA, ORD and JFK, which each scored 94. The least miserable airports for summer travel, MileCards.com calculated, are San Jose and Portland, with Misery Scores of 11 and 12 respectively.

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Which airline flies the fastest?

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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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