Delta is the most on-time U.S. airline followed by Alaska and then American. Frontier and JetBlue are rock bottom.
Cancellations tell a different story of reliability. A flight is late if it arrives more than 15 minutes behind schedule. But whether it gets there at all matters!
Delta Air Lines used to be head and shoulders above the industry, going months at a time without cancelling a flight. No longer. They still do a good job, but they’re no longer the best in the industry at that. Enilria ran the numbers on the airlines and their regional partners who cancelled flights the most in 2023.
In general regional carriers (like SkyWest and Republic, that fly under the brands of the big airlines using regional jets) are less reliable than mainline airlines. That’s not entirely their fault. When bad weather rolls in and the number of flights out of an airport are limited, it’s usually regional flights that get cancelled first. There may be more flights, with fewer passengers each, so it’s an easy choice to make. In contrast a once a day long haul flight across the Atlantic or Pacific on a mainline carrier may get priority.
The exception to this rule seems to be Alaska Airlines. Alaska has the most reliable regional operation, and also the second most reliable mainline operation behind Allegiant.
Delta is even more likely to cancel a flight than Southwest Airlines – a far cry from common perception of Southwest that built up after their holiday 2022 meltdown. Delta operates on-time much more often, but Southwest completes slightly more flights. (Southwest also doesn’t have regional flights to separate out. Delta’s regional operation is far less reliable than mainline. And Southwest’s delays are often short, but frequent, given the quick turnarounds they schedule their planes for.)
American hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for improving the reliability of its operation. It cancels flights nearly as infrequently as Delta. And its regional carriers don’t cancel often either – less often, even, than United Airlines mainline. The problem is that American management has consistently said they believed all they needed to do to make money was operate reliability, when in fact this is baseline, necessary but not sufficient.
Down at the bottom are regional flights on United, and JetBlue and Frontier mainline. Neither JetBlue nor Frontier have regional carriers to dump their cancels onto, but then neither does Allegiant and they’re top of the industry and neither does Southwest. Frontier and JetBlue are both most likely to have delays and cancellations.
Here’s the data:
| Mainline/ | Cancel | |||||
| Airline | Regional | Frequency | Reliability | |||
| Alaska Airlines | Regional | 1 in 161 | 99.4% | |||
| Allegiant | Mainline | 1 in 148 | 99.3% | |||
| Alaska Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 124 | 99.2% | |||
| Southwest | Mainline | 1 in 100 | 99.0% | |||
| Delta Air Lines | Mainline | 1 in 98 | 99.0% | |||
| American Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 94 | 98.9% | |||
| American Airlines | Regional | 1 in 77 | 98.7% | |||
| Hawaiian Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 77 | 98.7% | |||
| United Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 71 | 98.6% | |||
| Delta Air Lines | Regional | 1 in 61 | 98.4% | |||
| Spirit Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 59 | 98.3% | |||
| United Airlines | Regional | 1 in 48 | 97.9% | |||
| JetBlue | Mainline | 1 in 48 | 97.9% | |||
| Frontier Airlines | Mainline | 1 in 47 | 97.9% | |||
Uh-oh, Gary is asking for it from you-know-who….
Interesting comment: “American hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for improving the reliability of its operation. It cancels flights nearly as infrequently as Delta”. This would suggest that American is worse than Delta on this metric, but the data says that they are better.
Those are interesting numbers. I always wondered based on my experience. I fly Delta and Southwest quite a bit. An occasional United flight. Out of my last 10 Delta flights 1 has been cancelled and 3 have been delayed more than two hours. The cancellation and 2 of the delays were regional and one delay was mainline. Only one delay was blamed on weather (not sure why, incoming plane arrived on time). I run about the same number of delays on Southwest but they are 30-45 minutes. I traveled BNA-ATL-HND on Christmas Day in 2022. Never seen so many people sleeping in an airport. That’s why I only Southwest for direct flights.
And cue Tim Dunn. You’re about to hear all about premium dollars.
Tim Dunn Exited Stage left?
When you want negativity just wait for Tim he will give it to you.
For years, I lived in smaller cities that had flights on American Eagle, Delta Connection, etc. Sometimes, the flights were cancelled. Finally, relief. I live in a big city where there are non-stop flights to the major cities, like LAX, and most of the major hubs.
The DOT published this data weeks ago.
You don’t have to wait for enilria; just read the Air Travel Consumer Report.
Cancellations are now heavily driven by weather and outside of airline control.
No hub is going to operate at 100% on-time or reliability.
Given that Delta and Delta Connection has more flights than any other airline in NYC, it isn’t surprising that they had to cancel some flights in 2023; the fact that it was only 1% is remarkable. and Delta is way out front in on-time in NYC – as well as the country. NOT cancelling at times leads to cascade of delays.
What the DOT doesn’t calculate is the impact to passengers – how soon before departure flights are cancelled. Even when airlines have to cancel, there is a big difference between a planned cancellation due to weather the day before and a drawn out delay that turns into a cancellation.
The DOT also reports the reason for delays. Delta leads the industry for the LOWEST percentage of air carrier controllable delays and late arriving equipment and a lower percentage of ATC system delays.
Delta knows what it takes to run a reliable operation and delivers on it better than its peers. No airline can and will deliver 100% on-time or 0% cancellations. Delta does deliver the best combination of all metrics.
Now, start talking about the difference in baggage handling and passenger complaints with DAL and LUV consistently at one end of the spectrum and AAL and UAL at the other end with the ULCCs even below AAL and UAL in complaints
1% cancellations doesn’t make or break anything. consistently and measurably poorer customer service does
For all the bellyaching these numbers seems pretty good
@Gary, when Delta went months and months without canceling (pre pandemic), what exactly was the cancellation frequency? Do you have those numbers? If DL operates 5400 flights a day, and used to go months without a cancellation, wouldn’t that old cancellation frequency be somewhere around 1 in 50,000 range or so???
Don
Delta never went a month without canceling a flight. If Gary is so certain that they have, he should be able to provide the data. The DOT has it. Gary is big about talk but a little about facts.
One issue with B6 is its concentration along the east coast, especially the north east. Should a winter storm sop in NYC, the rest of their system comes to a stop. Even LAX backs when this happens.
All of Delta’s cancellations are premium
Exit Row,
Delta operates larger hubs than JetBlue in the same major NE hubs.
DL’s on-time is consistently 15 points higher than B6’s on those two hubs.
B6 simply builds its schedules are blue sky weather which means that every time the slightest thing goes wrong, they are late.
Further, they push their schedule to the limit with no reserves – doing stuff like flying redeye turns from EWR to the Caribbean meaning a day with lengthy delays runs into the next day and the next day.
And it is also worth noting that WN runs the largest MAINLINE operation in the US followed by DL. DL also operates the most ASMs of any US airline ON ITS OWN METAL.
UA loves to talk about how big its network is but 44% of its domestic flights are still operated by regional carriers compared to 33% for DL, 36% for AS. Shockingly, AA now has a larger percentage of its network flown by regional carriers than UA.
and DL still has DAYS when it has 0 cancellations and at times has 0.0% cancellations on a monthly basis. That was the case in December 2023
Looking at a % of the schedule. B6 will always be where they are because of their hubs. Compare in each hub airline to airline and you’d find a different story. DL is also a nightmare in JFK on bad weather days.
@gary is a self proclaimed expert who doesn’t know how to compare apples to apples.
I guess I have had good luck on JetBlue and bad luck on United and Delta for domestic flights as for getting me to my destination in a reasonable time. Of course, most JetBlue flights have been nonstops and most of the others have been connecting flights so there is that. If it takes six hours for a nonstop and ten hours for a connecting flight from LAX to BUF with the nonstop getting in a half hour late and the other on time, which is the real win? I say that nonstop is still the real win.
Timmy aka the Delta Propaganda Bot strikes again.
When Delta has a high cancellation rate, it’s because of weather in the Northeast.
When Jetblue has a high cancellation rate, it’s because they aren’t as good as Delta.
Without even reading the full article…are you factoring in scope of operation/hubs/typical weather patterns etc? There are so many factors involved in airline cancellations that to simply say “x is more reliable than Y and Z” just doesn’t make sense.
If United has 1000 airplanes and Allegiant has say 50…who will be more reliable? The smaller carrier operating out of smaller airports with less delays.
Point being, there’s more involved than you can write about in one article on this topic.
@Tim Dunn
Stand back and smell the roses!! There is life beyond the Widget!!
As for Delta, it has the capacity to circumvent NYC when the snow hits the fan via other hubs and focus cities spread across the US.
Unfortunately , B6 has backed itself into a corner with too much northeast concentration. It needs some place in the midwest to build traffic and to act as an alternate route. It was banking on Spirit for a larger footprint across North America. Thanks to your buddy, Sleepy Joe, it’s a no go!!. Now, it needs to develop a plan B before Carl Icahn strips it bare of any assets.
exit row,
the cost of operating in highly congested airspace is to invest in backup resources.
Delta doesn’t cancel more in those areas or anywhere. and DL’s on-time is much higher because it has figured out how to operate in those areas when the weather goes bad which it will at least once every month.
A certain number of cancellations are inevitable.
It doesn’t have ZERO cancellations but it has once again hit the 0.0% RATE of cancellations.
JetBlue simply is not willing to invest in the backup resources to get its operation back on track and to keep it from falling off the track when the inevitable bad weather hits
Tom,
United operates the SMALLEST MAINLINE operation of the big 4 despite that they love to talk about how large their network is. Gary, like the DOT, is posting OPERATING carrier stats.
The DOT also rolls up data to the marketing carrier which means that codeshare AND mainline flights have to be considered in the final on-time numbers.
the fact that American is getting better doesn’t make DL’s position any less enviable. The fact that DL beats AA and every other airline in the composite of all DOT metrics is why DL will almost certainly be ranked as the US’ best airline once again for 2023.
I’m honestly surprised at AS performance in terms of cancellations. Excluding the operational impact of the MAX 9 groundings, of course. AS flies into a lot of remote Alaskan communities that pretty frequently have challenging weather and I would imagine greatly contributes to their cancellation rates.
Regardless of the stats provided, American sucks and it’s no wonder they have consistently been the worst rated major domestic carrier for the past several years. Most recently, I was trying to come home from Steamboat Springs (HDN). Yes, it was snowing, but every other carrier was landing and taking off, while our inbound flight diverted on final to Denver. After something like 5 or 6 hours, they cancelled and because they claimed weather delay (what really happend was their crew timed out), we were left to fend for ourselves until the following day – when our flight was rescheduled for mid-morning. After numerous further re-schedules, all the while Delta, Southwest, United, Jet Blue, and ever two other American flights, including the current day’s flight of our same #1923, came and went. We didn’t finally depart until over 34 hours after our scheduled departure. Let me say this again…. AMERICAN SUCKS…… and I will never, ever, ever fly them again.
Of course, Jetblue will have the worst reliability. Their entire operation is mainly dependent on the Northeast. They have zero room for error and schedule their flight attendants to the edge of their duty day. When a storm hits, they max out quicker.
@Robert Turner, a lot of airlines game the weather excuse. I had United do it when the real reason was the return online of the systems damaged in the 2014 Chicago Air Route Traffic Control Center fire. They simply didn’t anticipate the bugs encountered and the delays that they would cause but lied about the weather to shift the cost of hotel rooms to the customers. The FAA should crack down on the airlines using that excuse if other airlines are getting flights in and out. Weather is not so selective.
No surprise to see United at the bottom of the pack. More focused on devaluing miles or on what “history month” it is than getting cancellations down.
I am familiar with an AA regional station operated by SkyWest. I am not sure what is going on with SkyWest, but there is a recent increase in maintenance delays and cancellation’s causing havoc for PAX (not weather related). I do not doubt the safety of their planes, but SkyWest needs to pay more attention to their routine maintenance.
I am familiar with an AA regional station operated by SkyWest. I am not sure what is going on with SkyWest, but there is a recent increase in maintenance delays and cancellation’s causing havoc for PAX (not weather related). I do not doubt the safety of their planes, but SkyWest needs to pay more attention to their routine maintenance.