{"id":7055246,"date":"2026-09-03T00:31:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T00:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/airline\/just-how-long-airlines-delay-flights-cranky-flier\/"},"modified":"2026-09-03T00:31:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T00:31:45","slug":"just-how-long-airlines-delay-flights-cranky-flier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7055246","title":{"rendered":"Just How Long Airlines Delay Flights \u2013 Cranky Flier"},"content":{"rendered":"


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After writing up my recent 14-hour delay on Hawaiian<\/a>, GS left a comment<\/a> asking about the average length of delay for each airline as opposed to just the percentage that are delayed. At the time, I responded \u201cit\u2019s a pretty large and annoying project\u201d for me to pull all those flight-level details, but then I decided\u2026 ah, what the heck. Let\u2019s do it. I snuggled up with Anuvu<\/a> on-time data one night, and now it\u2019s time to talk about the results.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to just look at the average length of delay, because that isn\u2019t entirely telling. It can get skewed. Instead, I decided to create bands of delays to show what percent of flights for each airline fell into each group. Just extracting the data was going to take some time, so I settled on looking at just a single month. Naturally I took the heart of the summer and used this past July.<\/p>\n

Before we look at the numbers, keep in mind that these are all by marketing airline, so regionals are included. Now, let\u2019s take a look.<\/p>\n

Delay-Length Bands by Marketing Airline \u2013 July 2026<\/h4>\n
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Data via Anuvu<\/a><\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n

The lightest red at the bottom shows arrivals within 14 minutes of schedule (or earlier), so that is the number that most people are used to seeing as a measure of on-time performance. And the numbers aren\u2019t all that surprising with Alaska\/Hawaiian in first place thanks to their good operations and more benign weather. Then it\u2019s Delta with United close on its heels.<\/p>\n

JetBlue has had a miserable summer, and the weather has just been brutal for them. But they\u2019re always at the bottom. Frontier is bad, no surprise there either. But then there\u2019s Southwest which from this metric made American look good.<\/p>\n

On a recent episode of The Air Show,<\/a> I spoke with Southwest COO Andrew Watterson, and he talked about what the airline was doing to fix its issues. But he also noted that many of the delays were short, and that is important, because it is far less disruptive for travelers. This tells that exact story.<\/p>\n

As you can see, Southwest by far had the most delays that fall into the 15 to 60 minute category. Remarkably, if you look at A60 \u2014 the two bottom categories combined \u2014 Southwest jumps to third place behind Alaska and Hawaiian. (Technically, that\u2019s second place, but I broke out the Hawaiian and Alaska operations to show the differences there.) So Southwest\u2019s delays are annoying, but they aren\u2019t going to be as much of a fire-breathing, anger-spewing, \u201cI hate you x airline\u201d kind of delay, at least 91 percent of the time.<\/p>\n

A one to two hour delay is enough to make a lot of people made, and this is where we shouldn\u2019t be surprised to see JetBlue at the top with nearly 10 percent of its flights. Like I said, combine an already weak operation with exceptionally poor weather, and you are going to be in trouble.<\/p>\n

Frontier and Allegiant follow, and that\u2019s probably because when things do go wrong, they try as best they can to eventually run a flight. I say \u201ctry\u201d since Frontier still canceled 2.8 percent of flights and was below average. But Allegiant succeeded, being the only big airline that canceled fewer than one percent of flights. Allegiant does run a better operation than Frontier pretty consistently. Of the big guys, well, American is worst to the surprise of nobody. United did pretty well for itself.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s look at the really bad stuff, delays of over two hours. This is where gate agents start to need bodyguards. And sure, JetBlue is again the worst performer followed by Frontier and Allegiant. Shocking, I know. But to be fair, American is actually tied with Allegiant. <\/p>\n

Breeze stands out to me here. It was doing fine in the upper middle part of the pack in the one to two hour delay band, but over two hours? It has a lot of those. That\u2019s definitely something to keep in mind.<\/p>\n

I would see these are the main takeaways from a big picture perspective:<\/p>\n