Have A Nice Delay
The United States Department of Transportation has a sub-department called the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which presumably hires a bunch of statistician/actuary types and feeds them giant spreadsheets of travel data. The employees then go blind and insane after staring at only the numbers zero through nine for eight hours every day. But, before they go blind and insane, the data are converted into semi-human-readable statistics which can tell the public rather a lot about, for example, what's happening on the ground and in the air when it comes to airlines.
They have a web application that can retrieve analyses of airline delays, and the things it displays are potentially very interesting to those of us who travel often.
Here is a table I whipped up quickly that compares the delay times among the airlines I frequently fly for the 2006 January 1 to 2006 April 1 time frame. You'll notice American, every Dallas-ite's favorite airline (one of mine, too), takes the cake when it comes to delays. US Airways, which I fly between Pittsburgh and Boston, has the most favorable rating.
| Airline | Average Departure Delay (min.) |
| American Airlines | 9.87 |
| Continental Airlines | 8.87 |
| Delta Air Lines | 7.97 |
| US Airways | 5.53 |
Another interesting statistic I found when compiling this table is that every airline in the list had more than 20% of its flights delayed during that period, except for US Airways, which had only 17.39% of its flights delayed. My experience with US Airways, when I compared it to other airlines, has always been very good, and I guess it's not just me — the numbers back me up.
Comments
i think any of these delays are quite reasonable.
did you look up airtran? Probably not, ... bc their system can't take large integer values as high as the typical air tran delay.
Posted by: any | January 9, 2007 04:53 PM
Three things:
1) Congrats on the Master's Degree. Good luck on the PhD. You'll be Dr. W. before we know it.
2) Thanks for posting a blog that inspires the old neurons to fire. No offense to your cat, but I'd much rather read your opinion on transportation statistics and other pedantic miscellany than about the activities of your kitty, photogenic feline though she is.
3) I'm going to have to take a look at that website. Very interesting data, but it probably won't have any influence on my current travel patterns. Thanks for the link!
Posted by: arc | January 9, 2007 08:47 PM