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?
That's an excuse the AC apologists have floated out there for years, but it's simply not valid. Westjet flies pretty much exactly the same routes as AC does, and in exactly the same weather, yet it has consistently posted a significantly better OPT. Not just recently, but for years.
Delta has major hubs in MSP, JFK and DTW - airports subjected to weather that's on par or worse than anything AC's hubs in YYZ and YUL face. And the volume of flights they run out of these airports would easily exceed the number of flights AC operates out of eastern Canada. Yet their OPT is consistently better than AC's, and by a significant level. Ditto for AA, with its hubs in JFK, LGA, PHL and ORD, which on its own is easily among the most weather-delayed airports in the world. In spite of exposure to similar weather, and operating more flights, AA manages an OTP that is so much better than AC's that the difference is laughable.
Man alive, even UA beat AC in OTP, and in spite of also operating its main hub in ORD - along with EWR (another of the worst for delays), plus DEN and IAD - all airports that face their share of winter weather.
The argument that AC can't get a plane to arrive on time because of cold weather just doesn't hold up. The problem lies in a toxic company culture, starting from the corner office.