The annual Airline Quality Report (AQR) was published today by Dr. Dean Headley out of Wichita State University. Big deal, you say, airlines continue to suck. You’ve got that right. Distill the 60 page document down to its roots and you’ll find that the industry scored its worst ranks of all time in the history of the twenty year study.
Overall quality of an airline was taken as a weighted average across factors of the airline being:
- On Time
- Denied Boardings (overbookings)
- Mishandled Baggage and
- Customer Complaints
The lower a carrier scores, the worse its performance. Let’s take a look at the data:
- Southwest Airlines had the best on-time performance with 82.4% of flights on time, while Atlantic Southeast, Comair, American and American Eagle had the worst records at 66.9%, 67.3% and 67.4% (tied) respectively.
- Atlantic Southeast, Comair and Skywest had the most denied boardings at 5.43, 3.32 and 2.73 passengers bumped per 10,000 respectively, while jetBlue, Airtran and United had the best at 0.04, 0.21 and 0.40.
- Skywest, and American Eagle lost the most bags, at 17.95 and 17.38 bags lost per 1,000 passengers each. Conversely, AirTran and Northwest lost only 3.63 and 5.26 bags per.
- 2.07 out of 1000 passengers complained about United Airlines, while only 0.19 in 1000 complained about Mesa.
- Balanced, AirTran had the best performance, while Atlantic Southeast had the worst.
Ranked, the airlines stacked up as follows
- Airtran
- jetBlue
- Southwest
- Northwest
- Frontier
- Continental
- Alaska
- United
- American
- Delta
- US Airways
- Mesa
- SkyWest
- Comair
- American Eagle
- Atlantic Southeast
Other interesting things to consider
- The top three airlines are all Low Cost Carriers (LCCs). The best legacy carriers were Northwest, Continental and Alaska.
- Airtran, American Eagle, Atlantic Southeast and Mesa actually improved from 2006 to 2007. It’s just that the other airlines did so poorly that it dragged the average down. Atlantic Southeast, for example, was already poorly ranked, it was just less poorly ranked this year.
- It’s important to consider weather and hubs into the equation. Hawaiian Airlines, for example, received excellent results last year, but that’s partially because they fly in near-perfect weather and everyone is always happy when they are on vacation in Hawaii (so they won’t complain). Compare that to American and American Eagle, both of whom have hubs in Chicago. On-time rankings were considerably worse for New York based carriers
- 17.95 bags per 1000 may seem bad, but that’s really only 1.795%
So what does this tell us overall? Well, as we concluded earlier, not much. You have to consider that there is some noise in the data that comes from increased media coverage and oversight on the airline industry. Now that you know that there is a survey, you’re going to have a higher chance of complaining on your next flight, right?
The data will crawl around from good to bad to worse all over the place and we can analyze it until we turn blue. What’s important to take from this data is that there aren’t any large anomalies. Contrary to what you’ve been thinking, Delta employees haven’t completely given up on us and complaints have not skyrocketed. jetBlue did not lose an outrageous number of bags last summer for no reason.
At the very least, we can thus find solace in this normalcy.