DALLAS — If you’ve felt like your flights have been delayed rather than canceled altogether this year, you’re not alone.
This year, airlines heavily improved network reliability. According to travel tracker site Hopper, this October saw the lowest cancellation rate among U.S. departures since 2019. In October, 15% of flights were delayed on departure, down 25% during July.
Passenger delays and cancellations came under intense pressure from consumer watchdogs and politicians after a bumpy ramp-up for airlines after the downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic. Airlines in the U.S. canceled almost 140,000 flights in 2022, the highest number in recent history — except the pandemic-induced cancellations of 2020. A bumpy 2022 came to a crescendo last December, when snowstorms in Denver and Chicago caused thousands of cancellations, a problem so bad that Southwest’s network completely fell apart and resulted in nearly 17,000 nixed flights around the Christmas holidays.
“We know how frustrating delays, cancellations and rebookings are,” President Joe Biden said during a speech at the White House in May. “While flight delays and cancellations have come down since then, there’s still a problem.”
The rate of cancellations has dropped this year to 1.62% for data available through September from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, down 41% from the prior year.
Global travel data provider OAG reported Delta Air Lines had an on-time performance of 81.79%, United Airlines had a 79.1% on-time performance, American Airlines had a 77.38% on-time performance and Southwest Airlines had a 71.61% on-time performance in 2022.
At Fort Worth-based American Airlines, the airline reported a record third-quarter completion factor in October, operating over 515,000 flights with an average load factor of 84%. American also had a cancelation rate of 2.67% in 2022, according to OAG.
Jim Moses, senior vice president of DFW Hub Operations at American said the air carrier has a “HEAT” tool, which stands for “Hub Efficiency Analytics Tool.”
“This helps us keep our operation on track when there is a disruption outside of our control,” Moses said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News last month.
Conditions outside of an airline’s control prevent the carrier from operating a schedule on time, he said. It’s better to keep the crew with the aircraft and push the schedule back a bit, to make sure everything stays afloat.
“We will delay parts of our operation to allow our crew members to stay intact and cancel less to ensure our customers are getting our customers to their final destination,” Moses said.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines shares the same sentiment. Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told The News the airline is focused on getting passengers to their destination, but called it a “trade-off” with a delay that ultimately gets the passenger there.
“You always make that choice because I think our data would tell us that customers would rather be modestly delayed than have their flight canceled,” Jordan told The News in November.
Southwest also had a cancellation rate of 3.17% in 2022, according to OAG.
Hayley Berg, lead economist at Hopper said the majority of delays are shorter than 15 or 30 minutes, but sometimes it can feel like its longer than what it actually is.
“You’re stuck in a little queue with all the other people who want to get on the plane too,” Berg said. “Most delays are actually extremely short and then there is a very small tail of delays that that go on forever. From the airline’s perspective, their goal is to get their customers to their destination.”
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