Antarius

Purely anecdotal but AA seems to be trending downwards fast in terms of reliability. I'm now running 0/14 on on time flights in the last month or so for a variety of issues and it is starting to severely impact my ability to be places I need to be.

The DOT statistics show AA trailing the other majors as well. Anyone have insight into why?

PHL

My anecdotal evidence is totally opposite. My routes are usually weekly PHL to midwest locations with either nonstop or connections in ORD or CLT. I'm >90% on time or earlier arrival to the gate and 10% with random delays, usually during IRROPS.

Between Jan and May of this year, BTS stats show ontime rates:

AA 81.6%, with 5.22% being carrier delay
DL is 86% with 4.1% being carrier delay
UA is 83% with 3.59% being carrier delay
WN is 78.4% with 6.15% being carrier delay

This shows that yes - AA trails in both onetime and carrier related reasons for the delay. Frankly, anything in the 80's for on-time is a good achievement, but UA is holding up well and WN is comparatively worse.

Antarius

thanks for sharing. Interesting.

I guess what's really frustrating is the delays impacting being places on time as well as in several cases I am paying more for the earlier flight. So not only am I late, I could have been late at a fraction of the cost.

Catbert10

Flightstats.com gives a somewhat different picture. For the month on August, 24.82% of AA mainline flights experienced a delay of +15m. For comparison, DL was 16.12%, UA was 26.86%, and WN was 21.60%

I fly UA and AA and for me, it's been a brutal summer. Given that just about every AA trip involves 4 flights (connecting outbound, connecting inbound) I've experienced a significant delay during every AA trip for months. And given AA's aggressive hub banking, delays can be difficult to absorb. I've started booking the 3 hour connections rather than the 45m connections, but I guess so have others, because there's typically a sharp premium to book the longer connection these days.

ATLMike1234

The 45 minute vs 3 hour connections make AA unbearable as a connecting airline. 45 minutes is great when everything's on time and keeps travel time to a minimum, but their reliability has been so poor that actually making the connection is another story. And loads have been so high lately, and many routes run so thin, that rebooking can be difficult.

3Cforme

There's no need to rely on anecdotes - flight on-time performance reporting has been a DOT requirement for a long time. Data are in the public domain. The monthly Air Travel Consumer Report shows data by operating carrier, data by 30 major airports by carrier, and data by 30 airports by hourly arrival windows 0600-2259 hours. Every time one goes to buy a flight on-time performance will be reported by segment. (Changes to flight number and small changes to arrival/departure times leave prior data in place - they don't zero it out.)

https://www.transportation.gov/sites...-july-atcr.pdf

American hasn't been an on-time performance leader among the big carriers for any year in a decade or more. Why? Money.

Fewer reserve pilots = less cost.
Tighter scheduling = better aircraft and crew utilization, more passengers flown per aircraft day.
Smaller reserve fleets...
Smaller parts inventories...
Fewer mechanics on duty...

But - tighter scheduling increases the likelihood of crew timing out for the day or the rolling 30-day period.

Until there's a U.S. law requiring carriers to cover costs and compensation for passengers when they're delivered late, some carriers will continue to skimp.

saltytheseagull

AA runs a terrible operation, even with padded schedules.

remedy

Well, their reliability has been terrible for me in the last 30 days. Five significant flight delays resulting in missed connections and three flight cancellations - one of which resulted in cancelling the whole trip (for which I was refunded my fare + 20K miles) and one stranding me in Glasgow overnight l missing several important family events (with a rebooked itinerary requiring three flights and getting home very late at night the following day). Not so happy with AA these days.

BillBurn

There's an article in the WSJ this weekend on this very issue . It looks at cancellations and on time performance this summer and in general finds that there were significant improvements across the industry despite poor weather. However when it comes to American the article says that this summer "American’s on-time rate of about 75% was lowest among big airlines. Its cancellation rate of 3.1% was highest among all carriers and nearly four times as high as Delta’s rate of 0.8%." AA was also one of only three airlines (the other 2 were Hawaiian and Frontier) that saw an increase in overall cancellation rates this summer, so I would say your suspicion is borne out by the facts.

As to why, I'd agree with @3Cforme that American simply hasn't made reliability as big a priority as Delta. Delta loves to talk about all the investments they have made in reliability including how they keep lots of "ready reserve" aircraft at their hubs to fill in for planes that have maintenance issues or are severely delayed. They are also constantly stressing on their conference calls that they believe their superior reliability, despite a much older fleet, wins them a lot of corporate accounts.

American seems to content to run with much less recovery margin in their operations and appears reluctant to make the same investments in improving reliability that Delta has. My guess is that reliability should improve somewhat as they retire the last MD80s and the E190s and simplify the fleet more with the uniform seat counts, but it remains to be seen if they will make a lot of the "soft" investments required to improve reliability that Delta has.

ElCaminoReal

CrankyFlier has a nice write up analyzing the Big 3 performance by fleet type.

https://crankyflier.com/2018/08/20/o...r-than-others/

Antarius

this is my experience as well. I understand the overall stats, but the last couple months have been especially brutal for me too.

AANYC1981

mvoight

Different measurement period than the previous stats

Spanish

Very frustrating, but worth it once you're taking off an hour and a half late. So many tight connections sold much cheaper though...can be tempting, but generally is regretted.

smuDC-10