If you fly regularly, you understand that delays happen, and as a frequent flyer myself, I’ll say that they’re forgivable, as long as the airline gets me to my intended destination eventually.
Airlines, however, have been bragging about their ability to get you there on time.
Cirium has published punctuality data for 17 years, and its annual report is one of the industry’s most widely accepted benchmarks.
The aviation analytics firm’s CEP Jeremy Bowen told Skift that on-time arrival has actually become a bragging point.
“Airlines are now overtly sharing this with their passengers. They’re saying: If you fly with us, we will get you there on time,” he said.
But airlines are much less likely to market how often flights are canceled, particularly when those cancellations stem from operational problems. That has become a growing problem for Delta Air Lines.
Delta Air Lines has a pilot problem
Cancellations happen, and although passengers may not be happy when that happens, there are times they understand it. If, for example, your flight gets canceled due to a blizzard or a hurricane, that’s much easier to accept than a flight that gets canceled because there’s nobody to fly the plane.
Broadly, canceled flights are the biggest concern airline passengers have, according to a survey by Qualtrics cited by Forbes.
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“Canceled flights (26%), lost luggage (11.4%), and delayed flights (8.7%) took the top three spots for the single most frustrating experiences for passengers. But additional fees — whether it’s checked luggage fees (8.2%) or hidden fees (6.3%) — were still high on the annoying airline experience,” the data showed.
Delta Air Lines has been canceling more flights than its rivals, according to View From the Wing’s Gary Leff.
“Delta’s once-vaunted operation has become terrible. They canceled nearly 3% of their flights in July, which was worse than United and American and even about 2.6 times as many cancellations as Southwest,” he wrote.
The problems, he noted, start with weather, but that’s not the underlying issue.
“Delta has gotten much worse at recovering its operation once problems hit. They now tend to spiral. Management correctly blamed pilot scheduling as a challenge, but it’s also very much on their own management, not just for agreeing to provisions of their own pilot contract that their IT systems can’t keep up with, and for running an operation too short of cockpit crew,” he added.
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Delta Air Lines knows it has a problem
Delta CEO Ed Bastian addressed the situation during the airline’s first-quarter earnings call.
“Over the past several months, particularly following severe weather, our reliability and recovery haven’t met our high standards consistently enough. We understand the drivers, and this has our full attention,” he said.
He promised that the airline would address the issue.
“Teams are taking targeted actions to improve resilience and recovery as well as addressing challenges that have resulted from contractual changes to our pilot working agreement that came into effect over the past year,” he added.
Leff made it clear that the issues between the airline and its pilots will not go away quickly.
“The airline and pilot union went into negotiations to revise scheduling practices. The pilot union set up a website to blame management for cancellations even before Delta’s July meltdown. They wanted to make sure that when Delta says the problem is crew availability, that customers heard management has failed to invest in its operation rather than pilots refuse to work,” he wrote.
Delta Air Lines has been canceling flights
“Delta has an operational problem,” said The Cranky Flier Brett Snyder.
“Delta is not living up to the carefully-constructed brand image as an operational rock star over the last couple of decades,” he added.
Snyder used data from Anuvu to demonstrate the problem.
“Remember, a good standard is to try to complete 99% of flights or better, so if Delta is consistently up by 1 to 2 points on the industry as it was for years? That’s a huge difference. But it has slipped, and this year it has been downright worse than the industry overall in more than one month,” he wrote.
The airline’s problems, he shared, aren’t just an isolated issue or a few months.
“Outside of April, it has not been above 99% in any single month this year,” Snyder added.
Delta COO Ed Janki admitted to the pilot scheduling problem during the Q1 earnings call.
“We don’t have the resilience that we’re known for related to that. We know what the drivers of that are,” he said.
Bastian promised, during the same call, to fix the issues that were leading to cancellations.
“While this will take a little bit of time to work through, we’re partnering with our pilots and union leadership to ensure we deliver the reliability that Delta is known for. Reliability and experience go hand in hand, and we’re continuing to invest for our customers,” he added.
Leff, however, is not as optimistic that the airline’s issue with its pilots will be solved soon.
“The Delta pilots contract becomes amendable on December 31, 2026. The last negotiation took nearly four years from opening to ratification (25 months of active bargaining after excluding the pandemic suspension). So this may not be resolved soon. It’s also strong bargaining leverage in negotiations,” he wrote.
