Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken a look at airline operational data, and with the summer season beginning, this seemed like a good time. There’s been a lot of interesting movement as of late, but some of it is clearly temporary. See, Texas weather in May did not play nice, and any airline with a hub in the state had a rough month.

How bad was it? Well, let’s take a look at the three airlines with Texas hubs. First, how about American and its mega-hub at DFW?

American Arrivals Within 14 Minutes of Schedule – May 2024

Data via Anuvu

To be fair, Charlotte and Chicago weren’t all that much better, but DFW was still impressively bad.

For Southwest, it was a triple whammy with Dallas joining Houston and Austin as important stations. With so much focus on Texas, the rest of the network was bound to suffer… except apparently for Oakland.

Southwest Arrivals Within 14 Minutes of Schedule – May 2024

Data via Anuvu

Southwest has been pretty content as a middle-of-the-pack kind of airline, but May it fell down even below that.

And then there’s United with its Houston gateway. That was a gateway to delay in May. (So much rhyming….) United had been making big improvements over the last few months, but May was certainly a step backward.

United Arrivals Within 14 Minutes of Schedule – May 2024

Data via Anuvu

Notice that as bad as Houston was, Chicago wasn’t all that much better for any of these airlines. It was just a month to forget for those with hubs in the middle of the country. But that’s not the whole story for all the airlines. There have been some really interesting trends over the last few months, so let’s go….

Here’s a look at Department of Transportation metrics, using arrivals within 14 minutes of schedule (A14) to judge on-time performance. As always, I pulled the data from Anuvu, and I went back to the beginning of 2023 to compare. This chart shows each airline’s rank relative to the others with the best at the top.

Airline Relative On-Time Performance Rank (A14) by Month

Data via Anuvu

Delta is Back on Top

As usual, Delta was at the top of the list, but it really struggled when it came to canceling flights in 2023. For the first nine months of 2023, only one (May) saw fewer than 1 percent of flights canceled. But since then, Delta has only canceled more than 1 percent of flights once, in January.

It looks like Delta may have padded flight schedules a little more during the back half of last year to get back on track, but it has come back down to its normal level of padding. The airline is back where it wants to be.

Alaska Stumbles, Thanks to Boeing

If Delta is at the top, Alaska is usually right there as well. But things have not gone well for Alaska this year. January saw A14 tank to just under 65 percent. The airline also canceled more than 10 percent of flights. Hmm, why could that have happened? Oh yeah…

Image via Alaska Airlines

The plug door fell off.

Alaska had a big percentage of its fleet grounded, and it scrambled in January to get things on track. The airline’s performance did get back toward normal in February, though its A14 is probably still a few points lower than it would like.

I should note that United saw the same problem in January since it too flies MAX 9s, but nobody else was impacted in the US.

Spirit Rises While Frontier Falls

The importance of operational reliability for ultra low cost carriers has been addressed so many times… yet somehow Frontier has not gotten the message. The airline’s operation has been the worst in the industry this year.

February was a good month with nearly 80 percent of flights on time and a 99.8 percent completion factor. But that was the only good month. No other month was above 72 percent this year, and all of those saw more than 1 percent of flights canceled. I thought this new out-and-back base structure was supposed to improve reliability. So far, that’s not happening.

Spirit, on the other hand, is coming up from its bottom-dwelling position, though it hasn’t been a straight-line improvement. Spirit had improved performance long ago, and it has struggled to keep things at a high level. But hey, at least it’s not Frontier.

JetBlue’s Wildly Good May

If there’s one thing we’ve been able to count on for years, it’s that JetBlue will have a terrible operation. The airline has built a brand that’s synonymous with poor performance, but May was not bad at all. To be fair, JetBlue does not have a hub in the middle, so it would not have seen the impact from those storms in Texas nearly to the same extent as others. But even the aggregate numbers were pretty decent.

The airline completed 99.4 percent of flights, the first time over 99 this year. Its A14 was at 76 percent, just below the 77 percent in April. That April performance was the best A14 number for the airline going back at least to the beginning of 2023. By the way, the first week of June looks even better so far.

It’s probably too much to hope that the airline has miraculously turned around, but it’s still a nice sign.

As usual, summer is when we find out which airlines really are operationally strong and which will fall apart. But then again, you never know where those storms will hit on any given day, so it is somewhat of a crapshoot.

I’ll take another look once summer is done and see how it all shook out.

Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May

Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May

Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May

Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May

Texas Tanks Airline Ops in May