I suggest reading the previous two posts to understand the airport factors.
Essentially, what we are doing here is attempting to build a context neutral stat. For example, we don't want a limitation of an airport to hinder the stats of the airline. Granted, airlines choose to fly in to these airports and they know what they are getting into from an operations standpoint prior to making the commitment. However, lots of times the profitability of the routes are weighted higher than the operation of the airport. Basically, what I am saying is that to understand the true performance of the airline operations we must strip out anything directly related to the overall performance of the airport, but to understand how an airline in general is performing we may want to keep this variable in place due to the fact the airline decided to fly in and out of that particular airport.
Below are the on time performance stats for each major US airline for all of 2015 and 2016. These are the stats the media outlets typically site when ranking the airlines' dependability.
| OT% | |
| HA | 0.938 |
| AS | 0.900 |
| DL | 0.857 |
| AA | 0.819 |
| WN | 0.808 |
| UA | 0.803 |
| F9 | 0.773 |
| NK | 0.754 |
| B6 | 0.750 |
While these rankings are not entirely accurate they do generally get the list- at least from top half to bottom half - somewhat right. Now it is questionable whether these rankings that come out each year - and almost every news outlet reports on it (everyone loves to hate the airlines) - do anything to steer people to one airline over another. In my opinion, it does not. In reality a person's view of an airline is somewhat like political views. You can debate with a person until you are blue in the face, but if that other person has a preconceived notion of the airline in debate there is no swaying them in either direction. For example, if my friend had a bad experience with Delta - lets say his flight was delayed by four hours as he was trying to get to a wedding - and he saw CNN release a list of airlines that had Delta number one for best on time performance, he is most likely not going to switch his future plans to now include Delta as a potential transport. He is going to remember his recent terrible experience and steer clear. That is one theory. Another theory - and one that I tend to buy into even more - is that for a majority of domestic air travelers flights are a commodity. This means they are looking for the cheapest fare and will make their decision regardless of how any of the airlines have performed operationally in the past. If this assumption is true, and a traveler sees two identical fares with the same flight times, etc., then he or she may.... may.... be persuaded to go with an airline they had heard was better at delivering on their promise to depart/arrive on time.
So what does all of this have to do with our attempt to better rank airline on time performance?
Not much, which is the point. This is really a labor of love. Just like the current rankings that are published - I don't forsee this to motivate travelers to or from a certain airline. So after some tedious calculations here are what I am calling the True On Time Performance (T-OT%) stats for the same major US airlines.
| T-OT% | |
| AS | 0.895 |
| DL | 0.875 |
| HA | 0.874 |
| AA | 0.856 |
| UA | 0.844 |
| WN | 0.837 |
| F9 | 0.803 |
| NK | 0.793 |
| B6 | 0.789 |
As you can see the context neutral stats have brought on some slight changes to the rankings. Hawaiin went from number one to number two. Alaska jumped from two to one and Delta three to two. Southwest and United swapped spots and the bottom three (Frontier, Spirit and JetBlue) remained the same.
The easy one to explain is Hawaiin. They fly from Hawaiin airports more than any airline. Those airports are known for their great on time stats. Great weather has a lot to do with it, but they also have less traffic which always helps - less congestion at the gates and on the runways.
To understand how and why each airline's numbers shifted you would need to take a deep dive into the company's network of airports with the theory being that if an airline flies from more airports that have bad operational times than ones with gone times - that airline would see their numbers shoot up when going from looking at regular to true on time performance. Let's take the bottom three on the list for an example. All three (F9, NK, and B6) saw an increase to their true on time performance average. This makes me believe that these airlines have been flying from airports that are hard on operations. This makes sense when looking at Spirit and Frontier - both ULCC's - with costs so important. These airlines will fly to and from any destination where the costs are low and the load factors are high. Sometimes how well an aiport is run is not taken into consideration. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but just something to take into consideration when analyzing these results.
I hope to be able to write more about this at a later date.
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