Southwest Airlines tops on-time performance in February for major domestics airlines

February will go in the history books as a particularly brutal weather month across an unusually wide swath of the United States. And, needless to say, that made it an extraordinarily challenging month for commercial aviation.
 
But no matter.
 
February also will go down in the record books as the month Southwest Airlines finally rose to the top in on-time arrival performance among major domestic carriers, according to statistics released today by FlightView, a Newton, Mass.-based provider of global airline and airport performance data.
 
Southwest has its largest hub operation at Chicago's Midway Airport.
 
Southwest Airlines notched a 77.4 percent on-time arrival record in February, down slightly from the 78.9 percent it notched in January. Delta Air Lines, which had the best on-time performance for a number of months running, slipped badly in February to 74.0 percent on-time arrivals, down from 80.1 percent in January.

But the flight cancellation stats for February also indicate just how much weather wreaked havoc on airline schedules.

FlightView data showed Southwest canceled 3.6 percent of its flights in February, up dramatically from 1.6 percent in January, while Delta, which has a particularly large operation in the Northeast where several snowstorms hit particularly hard, cancelled 4.0 percent of its flights in February, up from 2.3 percent in January.

Meanwhile, American Airlines and Chicago-based United Airlines, both with large operations in Chicago, wound up with relatively poor on-time arrival numbers in February. United got 68.0 percent of its flights to the gate on time, down from 70.3 percent in January, while only 65.8 percent of AA's flights arrived on time, down from 69.6 percent in January.

U.S. Airways, which is in the process of merging with AA, got 68.0 percent of flights to gate on time, down from 73.0 percent in January.

United cancelled 5.4 percent of its scheduled flights in February, up from 3.7 percent in January, while American cancelled a whopping 8.3 percent of flights, up from 3.9 percent in January. U.S. Airways cancelled 5.8 percent of flights in February, up from 3.6 percent in January.

An on-time arrival is one where a plane arrives at the gate within 14 minutes of its scheduled arrival time.

(Lewis Lazare - Chicago Business Journal)