Yes, but that would have blown up their delay percentages. Also note that AA's delay statistics have improved significantly from that period of time.

The point I am driving at is these stats aren't caused by SHARES, becauseCO was able to operate OK pre-merger (as was UA). This appears to be negative synergy from the merger. UA execs should be sweatin' up a storm over this. Let's see if they can get themselves out of the ditch, but they are surely in one now.

True but CO was also running a different operation. I don't know what's so different. Sure they're bigger, but that shouldn't be the only reason for the troubles.

Something is very, very wrong. Operations Pre-3/3 were decent for both. Since 3/3, we haven't had a day where everything went on time at PWM. Not even close.

It's honestly like they took the WORST parts of each airline, not the best. Which is too bad, since had they taken the best from both, the airline could have been truly special. Instead, the new UA is just a shadow of the old UA and the old CO.

That doesn't prove much of anything. CO was a different animal pre-merger, and SHARES issues and limitations are likely more prevalent in the larger, combined carrier with a more complicated route network and more complicated transactions.

A small business may be able to get away using QuickBooks, but QuickBooks will quickly break under a larger organization.

These numbers aren't really that bad relative to other recent airline mergers at similar stages of integration.

DL/NW - 70.2% and 69.9% in months 5, 6 post-reservations cutover
US/HP - Didn't get back above 70% for 6 months after their disastrous cutover (got as low as 55%)

Clearly it's bad and needs to get better quickly but it's pretty much par for the course...

CO was not particularly "small". Keep in mind that UA was the airline that coughed up the ability to serve NRT and LHR from NYC, not CO.

What we know now is that the combined airline is faceplanting.

UA made a strategic choice to make their east coast hub IAD - don't know that is better or worse than splitting ops with NYC. It did seem to work for them though and general operations in the DC airspace are better than the NYC airspace. In any case I don't think "small" necessarily maps to numbers of ops but rather to system complexity. CO had essentially 2 hubs (and a few lesser hub-ettes) so support. If you look at a connectivity graph with 2 hubs it is pretty simple - a trunk between the hubs and the spokes. The new airline has SFO, DEN, IAH, ORD, IAD, EWR as major hubs and it has more hub-ettes with LAX, GUM, NRT, CLE, etc. The connectivity graph for a 6 hub map is much, much, more complex mathematically. The assignments of aircraft to such a graph, the routing of passengers and crews through it, and most of all the re-route/recovery options (and requirements) are all vastly more complex in such a graph. It seems to me that it is this complexity that is killing them at the moment. UA operations understood this level of complexity because even a 4 hub graph is much, much more than twice as complex as a 2 hub one. This isn't bashing what CO was - it is just the mathematical reality of the complexity of graphs - and scheduling an airline is an exercise in mathematical optimization.

And when you start aggressively cross-fleeting to take advantage of the synergy that the merger is supposed to bring, but don't have enough spare parts pre-positioned and still have separate employee groups, it just adds to the complexity.

And it's a strange way of cross fleeting. Airports that are equipped for 737s get all airbus (like a lot of IAH flights) and previous airbus airports like DEN get lots of the 737s.

According to the last page of the report, they even kill puppies!

+1 - there is a vast amount of hyperbole going on around here about a relatively small dip in performance. Take a look at the following for some perspective:

LOL - you're joking, right? You know it's high 60s in June and mid 60s in July for on-time performance, lagging the other majors by 10-15 points (and dead last by far out of the 15 airlines tracked in the DOT statistics)...is that "vast hyperbole" in terms of operational issues?

To say nothing of the highest IDB/cancel rates in the industry, 3x as many consumer complaints as the next highest carrier (AA). Maybe the switch will magically flip post-summer - but for now it's getting worse.

Just wow.

Don't confuse the issue. Of course the current performance is terrible - I have absolutely no disagreement there and have been directly affected by cancellations, delayed flights, etc.

My comment is directed at the frequent comments I see here along the lines of yours and several others who would have us believe that the airline is fundamentally broken and it is "running itself into the ground" with chronically poor performance.

I don't think there's anything "magical" about it. Sometimes there needs to be periods of poor performance to get airline executives to spend the money on internal programs that can fix things like this. The data speaks for itself though - in the past 5 years the current performance is far from notable - hopefully it is seen as bad enough for them to do something about it.

If it was a "relatively small dip in performance," why did Jeff Smisek apologize for it?

The company is not running itself into the ground with poor operational performance. They're running it into the ground with poor customer service, customer-hostile policies, and inadequate technology which negatively impacts the customer experience.

The poor operational performance just compounds what they're already doing.

I don't think we will see (or know) the full impact until all the Q3 numbers come out.