EIPremier

As I have said numerous times on various forums, I think this report is worthless. It has nothing to with how AS scored, as I said the same thing even in years when AS was ranking at or near the top. The problem is that the authors plug the data into this phoney baloney formula which places completely arbitrary weights on the different performance metrics. It's really comparing apples to oranges.

As others pointed out, the only reason AS saw its score drop in 2009 was due to the increase in denied boardings. Just based on the other three categories (complaints, mishandled baggage and on-time performance), they would have ranked as one of the top carriers. Over the past 12 months, AS is the #1 on-time carrier in America (excluding Hawaiian), now averaging close to 87%. However, the standard deviation for on-time performance is much smaller between carriers compared to something like involuntary denied boardings, as a few airlines don't oversell and by no small coincidence also all score at the top of the report. So, the range of inputs for IDBs would be between 0 and 3 (that's per 100,000 people), where as for on-time performance, the standard deviation is extremely small, with nearly all carriers scoring between 0.7 and 0.85). 0.7 being 70%. Aside from which, the authors never bother to consider whether the delays are under the control of the airlines are not, even though the DOT publishes that data, so again it's basically meaningless. For baggage handling, the range of inputs falls between about 2 and 10 mishandled bags per 1,000, so the SD is probably at least 2. Anyone else see a problem with the formula in the report?

All I'm saying is that the study looks at data that is of dubious significance, and furthermore, places an unreasonably high weight on involuntary denied boardings. Would anyone really choose not to fly with a carrier based on a 1 in 50,000 chance of being denied boarding? Especially since it generally only is a concern to people checking in near the cut-off time anyway.