U.S. Airline Industry Giving Worse Service, Study Contends

By Jennifer C. Kerr

More airline passengers bumped, more bags lost and fewer on-time flights. For the third year in a row, those problems grew worse for the industry, according to an annual study that rates airline quality.

“[Airlines] just don’t get it yet,” said Dean Headley, an associate professor at Wichita State University and co-author of the study being released today.

The study does not include information from recent weather- related flight delays such as the ones that left JetBlue and United Airlines planes idling for hours on taxiways and disrupted airline schedules at Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Cheektowaga.

An industry spokesman does not expect travel woes to improve anytime soon.

“We’re going to see more delays, and those delays translate to cancellations, mishandled bags and unhappy passengers,” said David Castelveter, spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a trade group for the major U.S. carriers. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

Castelveter blamed the majority of delays on bad weather. Making matters worse, he said, more planes are going to be in the air in the coming years and the air traffic control system is not capable of handling the rate of growth.

Congress, he said, needs to provide more money to update the system so it better can handle traffic and weather problems.

The Airline Quality Rating report, compiled annually since 1991, looked at 18 airlines and was based on Transportation Department statistics. The research is sponsored by the Aviation Institute at University of Nebraska at Omaha and Wichita State University.

Among the study’s conclusions:

* Southwest had the lowest number of complaints in 2006, 0.18 per 100,000 passengers. United and US Airways were tied with the most complaints, 1.36 for each 100,000 passengers.

* Hawaiian Airlines had the best on-time performance (93.8 percent) for 2006, followed by Frontier Airlines (80.7 percent) and Southwest (80.2 percent). Atlantic Southeast Airlines had the worst on-time performance (66 percent). On-time was defined as within 15 minutes of the scheduled arrival time. Canceled and diverted flights were counted as late.

The biggest disappointment came in the rate of mishandled bags, Headley said.

Last year, 6.50 bags were lost, stolen or damaged for every 1,000 passengers, compared with 6.06 per 1,000 in 2005. Hawaiian had the best baggage handling performance; Atlantic Southeast, the worst.

On-time performance, the report said, worsened last year, with 75.5 percent of flights arriving on time, compared with 77.3 percent in 2005.

JetBlue Airways took a hit in February, when passengers on 10 planes spent from five to 101/2 hours on John F. Kennedy International Airport runways. The study found an increase in passengers bumped or denied boarding because of oversold flights — 1.01 denied boardings per 10,000 passengers last year, compared with 0.89 per 10,000 in 2005. JetBlue had the lowest rate; Atlantic Southeast, the highest.

(c) 2007 Buffalo News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.