Virgin America, JetBlue Operating Less Than 70% of Flights On Time in 2017
Believe it or not, the most-hated and worst-ranked airline in the US isn't the worst performing airline in the US. Instead, Virgin America and JetBlue's on-time percentages are making Spirit Airlines' 75.5% on-time percentage look pretty good.
Based on statistics from January through October 2017 — which is the most recently released data — both Virgin America and JetBlue have less than a 70% on-time percentage.
| Airline | On-Time | % Late | % Cancelled | % Diverted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hawaiian | 88.9% | 10.8% | 0.27% | 0.08% |
| Delta | 84.8% | 14.1% | 0.87% | 0.20% |
| Alaska | 82.4% | 16.5% | 0.80% | 0.28% |
| United | 81.2% | 17.4% | 1.20% | 0.24% |
| American | 79.4% | 18.8% | 1.55% | 0.23% |
| Frontier | 77.8% | 21.0% | 1.03% | 0.15% |
| Southwest | 77.7% | 20.6% | 1.49% | 0.19% |
| Spirit | 75.5% | 20.6% | 3.75% | 0.14% |
| JetBlue | 69.6% | 26.8% | 3.27% | 0.25% |
| Virgin America | 67.9% | 30.2% | 1.59% | 0.34% |
Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics year-to-date through October 2017. Percentages for on-time and delayed flights are rounded.
We were wondering if this poor performance could be due to JetBlue's significant operations at New York's JFK — which underwent a lengthy runway re-construction project through 2017 — and Virgin America's heavy presence in delay-prone Los Angeles (LAX). However, based on October 2017 data, these airlines are underperforming even at their home bases:
| October 2017 | LAX | JFK |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska | 89.3% | 100% |
| Delta | 89.2% | 75.4% |
| American | 88.5% | 74.9% |
| Spirit | 86.9% | --- |
| United | 85.8% | --- |
| JetBlue | 85.5% | 75.0% |
| Hawaiian | 84.5% | 75.9% |
| Virgin America | 78.6% | 71.2% |
| Southwest | 75.7% | --- |
| Frontier | 75.3% | --- |
There's a bit of a trick to these stats though — the three large US carriers utilize regional carriers, such as SkyWest, ExpressJet and about a dozen other smaller airlines. When there are weather or air traffic issues, the mainline carriers will force their regional partners to take delays in order to allow the mainline carriers to operate closer to schedule.
Then when it comes to reporting delays, the mainline airlines are able to tout their better performance, while conveniently, many of the regional partners are too small to require detailed performance reporting (and those that do report their operations operate as regional carriers for multiple legacy carriers). This makes it impossible to re-weight the results to include the regional carriers with the mainline operations.
Another bit of trickery: schedule padding. Many airlines will schedule flights for longer than the flight should take, which allows a little wiggle room to make up for delays and still have an on-time arrival. In fact, when Bloomberg spoke with JetBlue about their poor on-time performance, the airline explained that it padded its schedule less than its competitors.
H/T: Bloomberg
