'Airline Quality' Report Twaddle: Doing the Math

Not to beat what I sincerely hope will become a dead horse [hey, wait a minute! I love horses, and I'm still mourning my old quarter-horse Boots, who had to be put down a few years ago. What a horrible expression!!] ... anyway, not to belabor the point, but I'm still seeing credulous references in the media to that asinine annual Airline Quality report put out yesterday by two attention-craving, publicity-savvy professors -- one from Nebraska and the other from Wichita State, which I gather is a Kansas equivalent of Rutgers but without the Turnpike.

In the monthly widely-disseminated Transportation Department statistics that the report entirely depends on, the only really useful statistics are those on late flight arrivals, which of course are routinely reported in the press, month by month. In other words, it was absolutely not news that more than a quarter of all flights were late last year, based on published arrival times.

Only 1999 was worse in terms of percentages of late arrivals, but 2007 was far worse in the sheer number of them and in the number that were excessively late (more than 45 minutes beyond scheduled arrival.) Also, 2007 was the year in which airline-passenger strandings were at unprecedented levels, and airline domestic inflight service deteriorated to new lows.

But reporting those things would have required doing actual shoe-leather research. (Or, at least, a more comprehensive clip-job effort -- since I, for one, been reporting them for a year.)

Besides the yeah-we-already-know matter of delays, the other statistics are utterly meaningless to anyone trying to make sense of the current crisis in air travel. I'm flabbergasted to hear this report being treated so breathlessly on network television and in newspapers that used to have editors who could keep really egregious survey crap out of the paper.

Below, Terry Trippler, who runs a popular though somewhat pricey online travel site, does us a small favor today in running some of the silly numbers the Airline Quality Report regurgitates.

I beg to differ with Trippler on one thing: Last year was by most accounts the worst year ever for air travel in the United States. In simply regurgitating DOT press releases, the Airline Quality Report just doesn't do the kind of serious research necessary to show it.

From Trippler:

"Well the annual Airline Quality Awards for 2006 are out and as usual the anti-airline folks were excited as ever about the decline in service on the nation’s airlines.

Airline service is going in the wrong direction and has been going in the wrong direction for way too long. However, before some of these folks become too breathless with “worst year ever” type headlines - let’s take a look at the numbers.

According to an article in USA Today …

• Involuntary denied boardings were 1.01 per 10,000 passengers
• And the consumer complaint numbers were 1.36 complaints for every 100,000 passengers. *

I converted the stats to actual passenger numbers using the three Washington D.C. area airports

Washington Dulles

23 million passengers in 2006 = approx 63,000 passengers per day

• approx 6 ½ passengers were involuntarily bumped per day (entire airport – all airlines)

· about every day and a half – someone complained to the DOT about airline service (entire airport – all airlines)

Washington Reagan

18.6 million passengers in 2006 – approx 51,000 passenger per day

• approx 5 passengers were involuntarily bumped per day (entire airport – all airlines)
• about every other day – someone complained to the DOT about airline service (entire airport – all airlines)

Baltimore / Washington International

20,500 million passengers in 2006 – approx 56,000 passengers per day

• approx 5 passengers were involuntarily bumped per day (entire airport – all airlines)
• about every other day – someone complained to the DOT about airline service (entire airport – all airlines)"

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