- Airline
- Industry trends
- On-Time Performance
North America Airlines in 2024: Factors Beyond Control
Despite challenges, North American airlines posted a higher on-time arrival rate in 2024.
Aviation Consultant and Adjunct Professor
Duke University
On 12 of the first 25 days of November, United Airlines said hundreds of flights at Newark Liberty International Airport had to be canceled or delayed simply because of a shortage of air-traffic controllers.
It was nothing new. All year, the Federal Aviation Administration, short about 3,000 controllers nationwide, required cuts to flight schedules in the busiest aviation corridor in North America. During the summer, a 10% schedule reduction was ordered for the three main New York airports and more cuts in Washington, D.C. Then even more flights had to be grounded in August.
Despite that challenge and others, North American airlines posted a higher on-time arrival rate in 2024 at 76.36% compared to 74.45% last year.
There were more than 4% more total flights.
One key for airlines has been moving to powerful artificial-intelligence computing that can quickly re-arrange operations. That has always been a most-difficult puzzle. When airplanes and crews are out of place, gates are full and passengers are stranded, how an airline recovers greatly impacts overall performance.
Southwest Airlines, for example, suffered a major disruption at the end of 2022 not because of a bad winter storm but rather the airline’s inability to restart its 800 airplanes.
Southwest invested in new recovery system that improves crew communications and in minutes develops an efficient plan so a three- or four-day disruption is limited to a single day.
Last year, on-time performance increased almost two percentage points to 77.26%
Delta Air Lines once again was #1 in OTP, a particularly remarkable achievement considering Delta not only operates two hubs in New York but also fell victim to a week-long disruption from the July CrowdStrike cyber security failure. Delta’s recovery was much slower than other carriers.
Yet despite that setback, Delta’s performance the other 51 weeks of the year exceeded rivals by significant margins.
United is close on Delta’s heels, posting an on-time arrival average of 81.92%, just behind Delta’s 83.45%. For the year, Delta’s OTP was about one point below 2023 while United’s was about one point higher.
Considering the two are now the two largest airlines in the world in passenger traffic, as well as the leaders in OTP in their region, the reliability is a remarkable achievement. Despite increased growth, complexity, congestion and external headwinds like controller shortages, U.S. airlines continue to improve dependability, better-serving customers and their own bottom lines.
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