The federal government counts a flight as on time if it arrives within 14 minutes of schedule. Here are the government’s rankings of the leading airlines and their on-time performance for August. Wallace, a college student from Dallas, said on a recent Spirit flight from Dallas to Denver. “I’ve been on American Airlines, Frontier, Spirit - it’s all the same as long as I get to where I need to be,” Larry D. Loyal customers say you can avoid most fees and save money on the budget carriers if you pay attention to the rules. By keeping base fares low, they prevent the major airlines from pushing prices even higher - at least on the routes they compete on - said John Kwoka, a Northeastern University economics professor who studies the airlines. Travel is up by double-digits again this year on both airlines.Įven passengers on other airlines might owe the discounters some gratitude. Alaska Airlines is also the most on-time airline at Denver's DEN, with an average departure delay of just five minutes. All other airlines at DFW are delayed by 11 to 16 minutes.
JetBlue Airways is the least on-time airline with an average of 27 minutes. Traffic jumped 77 percent on Spirit and 39 percent on Allegiant from 2011 through 2014. Alaska Airlines is the most on-time airline at Dallas' DFW by a large nine-minute margin. The discount airlines, however, have their fans. “It became a mathematics game, and that’s ridiculous.” “I had to sit down and say: This is what I’m paying for the flight, then they’re charging me $3 or $5 for a seat (assignment), and I need to figure out how much baggage I’ll bring both ways,” she said. But when the airline switched to mimic Spirit’s low-fare, high-fees model last year, calculating the cost of a trip got too complicated.
She “loved, loved, loved” the hometown airline with its wild-animal logos and friendly staff. Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer, a Colorado travel writer, said she was a loyal customer of Frontier for more than a decade. airlines posted terrible on-time numbers and record cancelations in February, as winter storms fouled. Unhappy customers also complain about being nickel-and-dimed - all the fees offset the cheaper base fare. DALLAS - The bad news for travelers is that U.S. Spirit flies the A321 with 218 seats, JetBlue with 190, American with 181. Its new Airbus A321 jets arriving next year will have 230 seats. Frontier added 12 seats to its current planes by installing seats with less padding. It can add up to long delays as crews try to wait out the weather or fix planes to avoid canceling flights.Īnother source of irritation: tight legroom. They generally don’t have agreements to accommodate stranded passengers. It’s not as easy to put passengers on a later flight because there might not be one. With fewer planes and pilots, Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant have less flexibility to deal with setbacks like summer storms than do larger airlines. airlines - 34 percent of flights are late - and Frontier is next-to-last. So far this year, Spirit Airlines has the worst on-time rate among the largest 14 U.S. Only JetBlue Airways, at 74 percent, and Spirit, at 63.7 percent, ranked lower, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Reports of mishandled baggage and complaints were both up from a year earlier.Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu Regional airlines fly smaller planes and are usually the first to have flights canceled during bad weather.
One in every nine flights on ExpressJet and one in 11 on American Eagle were canceled.
Regional airline ExpressJet ranked last at 59 percent on-time.Īmong the largest five airlines, Delta was on-time most often, followed by American, US Airways, Southwest and United. Hawaiian Airlines had the best on-time rating - it usually does, being insulated from most of the mainland's bad weather - at 90.1 percent. Medina said it was remarkable that there were no violations of the tarmac-delay rules, which prohibit ground delays of more than three hours for domestic flights or four hours for international ones. "There were many times when it was simply not safe to operate, driving record cancellations." "We faced historically bad weather in February - literally the worst we have seen - with snow and ice storms nearly every day somewhere in the system," said Jean Medina, spokeswoman for the airline industry trade group Airlines for America. Airlines reported 23,719 canceled flights, or 5.5 percent of all scheduled departures, the highest rate for February since the government started keeping track in 1995, according to the Transportation Department.
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