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Close Enough!
Kirby's Korner · September 29, 2000

If U.S. airlines were baseball players, their batting averages alone would get them to the All-Star game every year.

If they were horseshoe players, we'd all likely say "close enough" and cheer them on.

They're neither. Airlines make one basic promise to us, and they fail at that promise one-third of the time. Everything else an airline tells us is fluff, an effort by marketing geniuses to separate one carrier from the rest.

What every airline promises is this: we'll get you to the destination on your ticket, on time and relatively safely. The food they provide, the legroom between seats, and the colors of their attendants' uniforms don't matter if they can't keep that basic promise.

And everyone who flies knows the airlines don't live up to their word.

There's another indication of this failure this week, when the U.S. Department of Transportation released its latest monthly compilation, "Air Travel Consumer Report." Among other topics, it covers flight delays for July.

There is some cause for celebration: the key figures for July were slightly better than similar figures for June. But in July, only 70 percent of flights from the 10 major carriers in the U.S. arrived at U.S. airports on time. And, says the department, "a flight is counted as 'on time' if it operated less than 15 minutes after the scheduled time."

Even in the worst academic settings, such a record would rate at best a "gentleman's C." In any real-world setting, failing 30 percent of the time to perform the minimum promised would result in immediate termination -- of a job, a contract, or an ongoing relationship.

It gets worse for individual airlines, of course. United was on time less than 42 percent of the time. Alaska and America West each scored less than 65.

The most troubling figures in the report are those indicating long-term trends. Since 1987, only 78.5 percent of all flights have arrived on time.The worst year shown ended in June 2000, with only 66 percent of all flights on time.

(The best quarter shown was, surprisingly, the fourth quarter of last year, when despite Thanksgiving and Christmas rushes almost 80 percent of flights arrived on time. Doesn't this say something about the value of advanced planning on the part of airlines?)

Even more troubling is our reaction to these abysmal statistics: virtually none. We fliers moan, we complain to travel writers, we bitch on message boards -- but we do little in a practical way to try to resolve the problem. The Transportation Department received only 388 complaints in July about delayed flights, during a period that -- by my calculations -- saw nearly 150,000 flights delayed.

The airlines have shown they are not up to the task of keeping their word. And they're all so poor at the task that it makes little sense to choose one carrier over the other in hope of making on-time arrival a selling point among them. (I can see the ad now: "America West -- we're there for you 64.4 percent of the time!")

What other solutions are there? I think flooding Congress-critters with complaints would do wonders. They're frequent fliers themselves, and it wouldn't take much of a populist uprising to get them to take action that would better their own lives.

Who else has suggestions about how we turn the airlines' disdain to dismay? You can reach me, as always, at david@ticked.com. Provide your name and the city or town you're from, and I'll publish the most promising -- or funniest -- responses in a future column.

David Kirby is the content manager at startup company iJET.com and was the founding editor of Interactive Travel Report. His column appears on Friday. You can reach him at david@ticked.com.