As usual, I loaded up the car and headed with the family to Arizona for Thanksgiving weekend. Other than occasional slow traffic and long lines at the Love’s Travel Stop in Quartzite, there wasn’t much risk of massive external delays. For those traveling by air, however, there’s always the seemingly-imminent risk of a true meltdown, stranding passengers all over. None of that happened. In fact, it was a remarkably good weekend for the country’s airlines.
Looking at Tuesday through late afternoon Sunday (when I had to pull the Anuvu data to write this post), not a single airline had canceled more than 1 percent of flights. Looking at the top 10 mainland US carriers (including regionals), 164 flights were canceled in total out of 127,420 for an impressive 99.9 percent completion factor.
Up at the top end, Sun Country didn’t cancel a single flight the whole weekend. JetBlue surprisingly canceled only one. Kudos to them both.
Frontier was the worst with only 99.7 percent while United was next a 99.8 percent, just slightly below American. They only slipped that “low” thanks to some snow rolling through Denver over the weekend and a little Chicago snow yesterday. To be clear, that is not low at all. That is a great result for everyone.
As for on-time performance…
Arrivals Within 14 Minutes of Schedule Nov 21 – Late Afternoon Nov 26 by Marketing Airline
Data via AnuvuAny day JetBlue clears 70 percent, let alone 75 percent, is a magical time for the industry. How did it go so well?
Airlines have figured out they need to staff up around holidays to avoid the wrath of Secretary Pete and the media, so they are better prepared. But then it also takes a little luck with the winter to get them through.
Things started off with the potential for ugliness when weather rolled across the eastern half of the country before the holiday. The worst of it was on Tuesday, but it passed by mostly overnight with the biggest impact on Wednesday in Boston.
Nov 21 map via Weather Prediction CenterBehind the rain were some gusty winds, but against the worst of that blew through overnight when it was less likely to impact flights, and the wind direction didn’t cause too much trouble anyway. The rest of the weekend was pleasantly placid for almost the entire country save a little snow in Denver over the weekend and passing through Chicago yesterday. That’s the biggest factor that determines operational success.
All of this success was very bad news for the media, which had seemingly blocked a few minutes at the top of the news to announce all of the horrible airline problems that would undoubtedly have plagued the nation. The failure of that to materialize didn’t stop NBC from trying to scare travelers. The headline read, “Thousands of flights delayed as holiday travel gets underway.”
Tom Costello breathlessly started off his report by proclaiming “this is the problem.” But he wasn’t talking about air travel. He was talking about traffic on the roads making it slow going for people getting to the airport in DC. By the time he got into the airlines themselves, he noted “we’ve only got a couple of dozen cancellations. Make no mistake though, this is an airline stress point.”
Fox News didn’t bother talking about actual delays, instead it tried to pre-scare people by telling them about tools to help travelers when their flights were delayed or canceled. And it’s Fox News, so it certainly can’t leave politics out of it. It found a way to run a story saying flights were unsafe this holiday, because air marshals had been deployed to the southern border instead. I’m not even going to link to that story because of how stupid it is.
Only the Durango Herald had a real story to report. Two flights were delayed a long time thanks to a dumping of snow.
With such little actual news, some media outlets instead decided to channel their favorite clickbait blogger and just focus on the stupid and absurd. Yes, by now, we’ve probably all seen video of that women on the Frontier flight who dropped her pants to go to the bathroom in the aisle because she couldn’t hold it. (If you haven’t seen it and want to, you can Google that too.)
I have a deep hatred for stories like that, because they add absolutely no news value. But on the bright side, if that’s the best that the media can come up with during a holiday weekend, things certainly did go very, very well.
