In July, JetBlue was dragging.
The discount carrier sank to near the bottom of the Bureau of Transportation’s monthly listing of on-time rates for U.S. carriers.
The BTS ranked the New York-based airline — beloved by some for its spiffy seat-back satellite televisions — 18th out of 19 carriers for on-time arrivals in July. During that month, 64.6% of JetBlue flights arrived on time. Only Delta subsidiary Comair posted a worse on-time rate, with 63.3%. Pinnacle, a carrier that flies regional jets in the United States and Canada for both Northwest and Delta, posted the top July on-time arrival rate, 85.6%.
JetBlue’s on-time rate for July improved slightly over June, when 64.9% of the carrier’s flights arrived on time. But the airline’s on-time performance was worse than the overall 75.7% average on-time figure among all carriers (which, by the way, improved from 70.8% in June).
In a brief e-mail to the Terminal, JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin suggested that the perpetually snarled airspace around New York’s Kennedy airport plays a significant role in the company’s on-time performance, or lack thereof.
“As New York’s hometown airline, most JetBlue aircraft touch JFK each day. The long-term solution to congestion in the Northeast is a modernized air traffic control system. We believe top priorities should be ATC efficiency and improvements to create increased capacity. We look forward to working with the FAA on operational enhancements at JFK, which we expect would enable us to improve our on-time performance overall,†Dervin wrote.
The situation in July was indeed ugly at JFK. Of the 4,762 arrivals JetBlue reported in July at JFK, only 60.1% were on time. Those numbers were better than the statistics for overall performance at Kennedy, where just 57.4% of the arrivals tracked by the BTS arrived on time. At the country’s largest airports, carriers posted an on-time rate of 74.9% in July, slightly worse than the 75.7% rate at all airports.
The bottom line? Resolving the airspace bottleneck over the New York area is going to be especially important for JetBlue passengers, given the carrier’s reliance on JFK.
But it’s unlikely officials will be able to detangle all that air traffic anytime soon, as the debates over possible solutions, such as the FAA’s proposed auctions for flight times, continue to drag on. On the upside, at least JetBlue is beefing up dining options for its new JFK terminal, so you can grab a decent bite if you’re caught waiting for your flight.
The discount carrier sank to near the bottom of the Bureau of Transportation’s monthly listing of on-time rates for U.S. carriers.
The BTS ranked the New York-based airline — beloved by some for its spiffy seat-back satellite televisions — 18th out of 19 carriers for on-time arrivals in July. During that month, 64.6% of JetBlue flights arrived on time. Only Delta subsidiary Comair posted a worse on-time rate, with 63.3%. Pinnacle, a carrier that flies regional jets in the United States and Canada for both Northwest and Delta, posted the top July on-time arrival rate, 85.6%.
JetBlue’s on-time rate for July improved slightly over June, when 64.9% of the carrier’s flights arrived on time. But the airline’s on-time performance was worse than the overall 75.7% average on-time figure among all carriers (which, by the way, improved from 70.8% in June).
In a brief e-mail to the Terminal, JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin suggested that the perpetually snarled airspace around New York’s Kennedy airport plays a significant role in the company’s on-time performance, or lack thereof.
“As New York’s hometown airline, most JetBlue aircraft touch JFK each day. The long-term solution to congestion in the Northeast is a modernized air traffic control system. We believe top priorities should be ATC efficiency and improvements to create increased capacity. We look forward to working with the FAA on operational enhancements at JFK, which we expect would enable us to improve our on-time performance overall,†Dervin wrote.
The situation in July was indeed ugly at JFK. Of the 4,762 arrivals JetBlue reported in July at JFK, only 60.1% were on time. Those numbers were better than the statistics for overall performance at Kennedy, where just 57.4% of the arrivals tracked by the BTS arrived on time. At the country’s largest airports, carriers posted an on-time rate of 74.9% in July, slightly worse than the 75.7% rate at all airports.
The bottom line? Resolving the airspace bottleneck over the New York area is going to be especially important for JetBlue passengers, given the carrier’s reliance on JFK.
But it’s unlikely officials will be able to detangle all that air traffic anytime soon, as the debates over possible solutions, such as the FAA’s proposed auctions for flight times, continue to drag on. On the upside, at least JetBlue is beefing up dining options for its new JFK terminal, so you can grab a decent bite if you’re caught waiting for your flight.
