Just saw the Dept. of Transportation’s latest “Air Travel Consumer Report” with all kinds of statistics for last year, especially, “on time” statistics. I thought it would be fun to compare it to the previous year’s report, and it was. There were also some surprises: in terms of “percent of arrivals ontime” United Airlines ranked 9th out of 20 in 2006. Last year, the carrier ranked 20 out of 20! Want to see how your favorite airline did? Keep reading.

Let’s cover the year 2006 first, and its top-10 best-performing airlines, in terms of “percent of arrivals ontime”:

• 1. Hawaiian Airlines - 91.9%
• 2. Aloha Airlines - 91.6%
• 3. Southwest - 82.4%
• 4. Delta Airlines - 79.5%
• 5. Air Tran Airways - 79.3%
• 6. Pinnacle Airlines - 76.8%
• 7. Frontier Airlines - 75.1%
• 8. Continental Airlines - 74.3%
• 9. United Airlines - 73.2%
• 10. US Airways - 71.8%

The top 2, of course, are not going to run into a lot of delay-causing snowstorms!

The lowest performer? Skywest at 65.0%

Overall percentage of ontime arrivals for all the airlines: 73.1%.

Now let’s move to the most recent statistics, for 2007. Here’s last year’s top-10 best-performing airlines, again, in terms of “percent of arrivals ontime.”

• 1. Hawaiian Airlines - 94.1%
• 2. Aloha Airlines - 93.1%
• 3. US Airways - 79.5%
• 4. Delta Airlines - 78.6%
• 5. Air Tran Airways - 78.0%
• 6. Southwest - 77.4%
• 7. Jetblue - 76.7%
• 8. Frontier Airlines - 76.4%
• 9. Continental Airlines - 74.7%
• 10. Alaska Airlines - 73.0%

Where did the previous #9 go? In 2007, United was in last place, with 62.1%.

Overall percentage of ontime arivals for all airlines in 2007: 72.4%.

The results for this past year are a little disappointing; the overall ontime percentage fell a bit, but there was good news for JetBlue and Alaska, which cracked the top 10.