Originally Posted by
FoxtrotSierra
Please excuse my naïveness in case I'm missing something obvious, but this being Air Canada, unlike DL, AA, or UA with huge hubs down in the South with no snow, AC has to deice each and every single flight in the winter season, and a waaaay larger proportion of their fleet/flights on a daily basis than the US3 do. Do these on-time stats factor de-icing times? It would be a massive red flag for the reliability of these stats if they did not equally factor this in across the board. Isn't it obvious that having to deice is going to take longer than not having to?
1. AC don't have to de-ice every flight in the winter, not even close. Especially in YYZ, where most of the problems are. Yes, on days where there is precipitation and it is below 0 it causes issues, but that is hardly every day in the winter.
2. Air Canada pads their flight times in the winter to account for de-icing, at least on some routes anyway (e.g. YOW/YYZ for sure).
3. If Air Canada isn't accounting for this enough in their flight times then Air Canada needs to fix that problem - it isn't a problem with the statistics, which are just reporting if the flight is on time.
4. Weather is hardly the only problem, or a problem unique to Air Canada. ACs OTP is consistently worse in the summer too, and UAs OTP is affected by places like EWR which are a gong show 365 days a year and yet they still seem to manage to do consistently better that AC.