Air Canada climbs rankings for most on-time airline in North America as U.S. carriers' performance tanks

Yahoo

5 days ago

Air Canada was ranked the most on-time airline in North America in June, but one expert warns there's more behind the numbers than meets the eye.
A new report from aviation analytics company Cirium ranked Air Canada number one in on-time performance against nine other North American Airlines, including Canadian competitor WestJet Airlines Inc., and U.S. giants Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines.
Cirium said Air Canada had an on-time arrival score of 77.15 per cent. Its nearest competitor, Spirit Airlines, scored 75.77 per cent. Delta was third at 75.62 per cent, while WestJet placed seventh at 71.73 per cent.
'To say that Air Canada topped one statistic is nice, but my view is that there are a basket of other measures that kind of tell a different story,' said John Gradek, an aviation expert who previously worked at Air Canada, and is now a lecturer and program co-ordinator in aviation management at McGill University in Montreal.
'Air Canada has improved. There's no doubt about it,' Gradek said. 'They've done a number of initiatives in the organization to get their staff to improve their on-time performance.'
He added that those include closing the boarding of planes earlier and planes departing earlier. Another practice Air Canada is turning to to improve on-time performance is cancelling flights when it appears they will be late and recoding them and changing their departure time.
'If a flight is going to be late at Air Canada, and there is a high probability that the delay could be significant, what Air Canada does is cancels its flight,' he said. Passengers then receive notification that they are booked on a flight with a different code but in the same seat but departing an hour later.
However, Kevin O'Connor, senior vice-president of global airports and operations control at Air Canada, rejects that claim.
'I can say that that is the absolutely false, that we do not try to modify or change the stats in a case like that. We don't try to gamify anything,' O'Connor said.
Instead, O'Connor said, Air Canada took a wholistic approach to fixing their on-time performance, including turning landed aircraft around faster, making sure employees are following boarding schedules and adding larger onboard luggage bins, which helps eliminate taking baggage to the plane's hold, just as examples. Air Canada is also employing artificial intelligence to design its flight schedule and predict where delays and potential snarls could arise.
'It's a lengthy list of initiatives that every branch (of the company) can buy into and rally around,' O'Connor said.
'We're starting on a new journey (with) a lot more technology and more AI. But we certainly still want to get a higher OTP (on-time performance score), higher completion, better customer service, better customer satisfaction,' he said.
The Cirium results represent a turnaround for Air Canada which scored 54.36 for on-time performance in January 2023.
Gradek said Air Canada's improvement represents just a part of what is behind the Cirium data.
'It's not so much that Air Canada and Spirit have done very well. It's that the rest of the crew, Delta, JetBlue American and United have tanked,' Gradek said.
Air Canada's May and June on-time performance scores that earned them the top spot are lower than the highs posted in October and November of 80.45 and 80.43 per cent, which were lower than all the American-based carriers during those two months.
U.S. airlines 'flights are really, really full. As you increase the load factor and increase the congestion, you have a corresponding drop in your ability to move those passengers,' he said.
They also operate more flights.
For comparison, Air Canada and runner-up Spirit completed 33,473 and 19,656 flights, respectively, compared with 158,294 flights for Delta and 148,620 for United Airlines and 197,703 for American Airlines.
O'Connor argued that while the U.S. carriers grapple with more passengers and planes, Air Canada deals with more longer-distance flights, which he described as a 'a significantly challenging network.'
'But probably the most telling part is air traffic control in the States,' Gradek said.
Aviation in the U.S. has been struggling with an extreme shortage of air traffic controllers, which has severely impacted air travel in some parts of the country, resulting in cancellations and flight delays. The shortage of an estimated 5,000 air traffic controllers has been blamed for several deadly accidents, including a crash over the Potomac River in January between a military helicopter and an American Airlines aircraft that resulted in the deaths of 67 people.
Gradek also pointed out that Air Canada came in second last in completion factor, which is the number of departures completed divided by the number of scheduled departures.
Air Canada also locked-in first spot in North America in May, CIBC Capital Markets analyst Ken Chiang said in an analysis of the Cirium report, noting that May was the first time that Air Canada topped the list in data going back to January 2023. Typically Air Canada ranked seven to 10 over the last year.
'While we would expect AC's on-time performance to improve coming out of the winter season, it also posted a significant year-over-year increase, up 755 basis points and outperforming the other top 10 North American carriers,' Chiang said. 'The improvement in AC's on-time performance highlights that its operations continue to normalize as it recovers from the pandemic, which helps drive improved customer satisfaction.'
As recently as the end of 2024, Air Canada was ranked among the 50 worst airlines, according to AirHelp Inc. The company facilitates compensation for passengers by processing customer service claims for flight disruptions and lost luggage.
AirHelp ranked Air Canada 91 among 109 airlines basing it on methodology which takes into account customer claims processed worldwide, as well as outside data tracking on-time arrival and departure performance for every plane, plus feedback from passengers from more than 54 countries on the quality of food, comfort and crew service on their most recent flight.
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Chiang in his research note nonetheless highlighted that Air Canada's on-time score significantly lagged those of other regions. For June, the most on-time region was Latin America, which averaged 83.90 per cent, followed by Asia Pacific at 82.06 per cent, Europe at 81.41 per cent and Middle East & Africa Airlines at 80.65 per cent. North America's average was 73.30 per cent.
'No North American carrier cracked the top-10 most on-time global airlines,' he said.
Gradek, however, said that most of those air travel markets are much less congested than North America's.
'We run a lot more airplanes, a lot more flights in North America than any other domain in the world. And so we have a congested airspace,' he said.
O'Connor also said that Canadian airlines performance improves when agencies such Canada Border Services Agency, NAV Canada, which operates the air traffic control system, and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, responsible for passenger and baggage screening, run smoothly.
'When everybody performs better, it will always come out in the airline's favour,' he said.
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