Alaska Airlines flights arrived on-time 87 percent of the time in 2016, earning the airline top honours in the 8th annual FlightStats On-Time Service Performance Awards among North American based carriers. Alaska’s on-time performance was even better (87.51 percent) when flights by partner airlines were excluded.
Other North American airlines that performed well in the FlightStats report included Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, WestJet, American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, Virgin America, JetBlue Airways, and Air Canada.
Flights had to arrive within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time to be considered “on-time” for the purposes of the survey.
The top on-time performer among international airlines were KLM for mainline operations (88.53 percent) and Iberia (87.79 percent) for network operations, which includes the Spanish airline’s partner carriers. Austrian, S7 Airlines, SAS, Lufthansa, Norwegian Air Shuttle, Aeroflot, Condor, and SWISS also scored high marks for their on-time performance.
The distinction between mainline and network performance is new for the 2016 report. “Many airlines want to be recognized only by their own operational performance, not the the performance of their regional airline partners,” FlightStats noted. “Since airlines don’t always have operational control over their regional carriers, it didn’t seem fair for us to not distinguish between (mainline and network) performance in our awards.”
OneWorld had the best on-time performance among airline alliances (81.19 percent), edging out Star Alliance (78.58 percent), and SkyTeam (77.70 percent).
To see the OAG report on Asia-Paific airlines, see
