Flightstats recently released a very interesting report around on-time airline arrival performance, and we thought we’d cover it for our readers in today’s blog. In the report, the stats on airline performance measured by on-time arrivals, are not only sliced and diced by market, but also by type of carrier (low-cost carrier versus major legacy airlines). Plus, there are some nifty infographics to boot, like this one, showing a red-yellow-green matrix rolling up the largest carriers’ on-time airline arrival performance.
The larger the box above, the more scheduled flights that carrier has, which is a neat way to represent this data. We can observe that in the North American market, large carriers are actually doing pretty good when it comes to on-time airline arrival performance metrics (kudos to Delta Airlines (DL) specifically). But, as we look at Europe and Asia, the larger the carrier is not necessarily correlated to positive on-time airline arrival performance statistics. China Eastern Airline (MU) does notoriously poorly as does Air China (CA) and British Airways (BA) as well.
We see some large international airlines doing quite well. Japan Airlines (JAL) for example, as well as Emirates (EK) and Qatar (QR), should come as no surprise. They have some of the best on-time airline arrival performance in the aviation business. This graph helps visualize the results further, and explores the relationship between airline size (measured by number of scheduled flights) versus on-time airline arrival performance:
You can see that the biggest outlier as far as poor performance goes is El Al (LY) – which only boasts a 35% on-time arrival percentage, with 2,667 scheduled flights. DL, UA, and AA also seem to be outliers, but from a positive performance perspective in relation to their respective sizes. If we try to draw a trend-line onto this graph, we would see that, in fact, as the number of scheduled flights increase, the on-time airline arrival percentage should decrease. This makes sense from a business management perspective.
Here’s the top 20 list:
Both Japanese airlines top the list (Japan Airlines and All Nippon), with Iberian Airlines (IB), and some of the Gulf carriers coming next to round out the top five.
You can interact with this data further on Flightstats.com.