US airlines on-time rate slides

Fewer baggage mishaps and bumped passengers reported

Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + By Nicole C. Wong

Globe Staff / May 8, 2008

The largest US airlines bungled fewer bag transfers and bumped fewer passengers in March than they did a year earlier, but their flights ran late more often, according to data released yesterday by the Department of Transportation.

The latest data show nationwide on-time arrival performance for the first quarter sank to its worst rate in 12 years.

"The fact that airlines are bumping fewer people and losing less luggage reflects the fact that there are fewer people traveling and airlines are not quite as stretched out as they were a year ago," said Henry Harteveldt, principal airline analyst for Forrester Research Inc. Still, he added, while performance isn't as good as it needs to be, "the airlines have all taken steps in the past year to reduce the number of people they inconvenience."

Nationwide, airlines mishandled 6.7 bags per 1,000 passengers in March - better than the 7.7 mistakes per 1,000 passengers the previous March.

And during the first quarter, carriers bumped 1.4 passengers out of every 10,000, a slight improvement upon the prior year's 1.5 rate.

Additionally, 71.6 percent of flights arrived within 15 minutes of the scheduled time in March - worse than the 73.3 percent posted a year earlier, partially due to disruptive weather. Carriers also canceled 2.6 percent of their scheduled domestic flights in March - the same scrub rate as in the prior March.

At Logan International Airport in Boston, 78.1 percent of departing flights were on time, while 72.6 percent of arriving flights were on time. Those were both improvements over March 2007, when 69.8 percent of departures took off on time and 64.9 percent of arrivals came in on time.

Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group Inc., an aviation consultancy in Colorado, predicts a passenger's chance of sitting on a delayed flight will increase every month because the antiquated air traffic control system can't handle the high volume of flights.

On top of that, there's the Federal Aviation Administration's stepped-up aircraft safety inspections, which prompted American Airlines, among others, to ground 300 planes and cancel more than 3,000 flights in April.

As a result, Boyd said he thinks the DOT's next release of airline performance data is "going to shock you."

Nicole C. Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com.