The Air Travel Consumer Report, a document assembled monthly by the Office of Aviation Enforcement and Proceedings, which is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, offers some occasional gems of information for people who travel.
Some airlines are anxious to report the DOT findings -- especially when they show up in the top of the rankings of the various categories. Others that don't fare as well and a number of analysts who monitor the data aren't quite as enthusiastic.
Mike Boyd of the Boyd Group, an aviation consultant in Evergreen, Colo., for example, believes the report isn't worth much because the data reported by DOT are self-reported by the airlines and there are a number of gray areas involved when it comes to issues of flight delays, mishandled baggage, seat oversales and consumer complaints.
In Business' sister paper, the Las Vegas Sun, reported on some of the findings in the frequently delayed flights category.
McCarran International Airport ranked in the bottom half of the nation's 33 major airports for on-time departures and arrivals. McCarran officials cited weather as responsible for many of those delays.
Now I'm no meteorologist, but I'm sure more than one person was perplexed with flight delays being blamed on bad weather in Las Vegas, where we're usually bragging about our tans and how the sun shines most of the time.
Like many other parts of the DOT report, there are unexplained reasons for the numbers published.
Looking at the DOT stats, one would conclude that planes left McCarran on time 83.5 percent of the time in April. DOT categorizes causes of delay eight ways. On a national basis, planes left on time 83.4 percent of the time -- so McCarran is right at the national average.
The biggest reason for delays -- at 5.8 percent of the time -- resulted from a national aviation system delay. That means events not relating to weather-affected flights, such as air traffic control problems, heavy traffic volumes and airport operation issues.
That's a more likely culprit than weather at McCarran, where wind direction dictates from what direction planes land. The problem on McCarran's parallel north-south runways is that they're not far enough apart to allow planes to come in simultaneously and air traffic controllers have to space arrivals farther apart.
At most times of the day, it's not a problem, but when things get busy at McCarran, such as at night, it can result in some traffic jams.
The next most-frequent reason for a delay falls on the air carriers themselves, 4.4 percent. Those are circumstances within the control of the airlines, such as maintenance or crew problems.
Late-arriving aircraft delays are responsible for late departures 4.3 percent of the time. That affects McCarran as well when flights come in from East Coast destinations that are affected by weather.
Some delays are outright cancellations -- 1.3 percent of the time -- and other delays are attributed to flight diversions (something results in a plane making an unscheduled landing), 0.1 percent; extreme weather, 0.6 percent; and airport security delays, 0.04 percent.
One Southwest Airlines flight from Las Vegas that ranked third worst in the nation for being late among all operations falls in the category of "all of the above" when it comes to reasoning why it rarely pushes back on time. In April, the flight was late by 15 minutes or more 80 percent of the time.
Southwest Flight 1660, which leaves McCarran for Phoenix at around 5:15 p.m., is one of the last legs of the flight. That means the plane has to be on time everywhere else it has been before it arrives in Las Vegas to go out on time. It also comes in at a busy time of day at McCarran.
Some other nuggets from the most recent DOT report:
• The three busiest air carriers serving McCarran ranked fourth, sixth and eighth among 19 airlines in the nation on reports of mishandled baggage. United, the No. 2 carrier in the nation, but No. 3 at McCarran, was fourth in the report with 3.08 reports per 1,000 passengers. Local market leader Southwest was sixth with 3.1 reports per 1,000 and No. 2 America West was eighth with 3.39 reports per 1,000. The leader in the category: Hawaiian Airlines, with 2.9 reports per 1,000.
• In the first quarter report on denied boardings -- the DOT's category explaining how frequently airlines oversell seats on their planes -- the local big three placed fourth, eighth and 13th, with United, Southwest and America West maintaining the same order of ranking as in the mishandled baggage category. The No. 1 operator in that category: JetBlue, which has a policy of not overbooking its flights.
• In the category of consumer complaints, Las Vegas market leader Southwest was also the top carrier nationally with the fewest complaints, with 0.11 complaints per 100,000 boardings. America West was ninth with 0.81 complaints per 100,000 boardings and United was 10th with 0.83 per 100,000. At the bottom of the rankings: US Airways, which is in the midst of a merger with America West.
Source: - Richard N. Velotta / Staff Writer - In Business Las Vegas
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