On a balmy 74-degree afternoon in early May, Southwest Flight 2275 from Los Angeles touched down in Las Vegas, ushering its six dozen passengers into the gambling mecca. The 57-minute flight wasn’t just on time—it was almost as fast as an airliner can fly that route, in keeping with a top-notch efficiency rating that makes the airline No. 2 among the ten major carriers on Forbes’ new ranking of fastest airlines.
Airlines like to talk about their on-time rates, a bragging right that helps attract frequent business travelers and offsets PR disasters like bumped or mishandled passengers. Some CEOs’ bonuses are even pegged to the measure. But the statistics, which have been compiled by the Department of Transportation since 1987, have major flaws, including a forgiving standard: If a flight lands within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time, DOT counts it as on time. How much time an airline schedules for a flight is entirely at its discretion, and since reporting began, airlines have been padding their schedules to make it easier to hit the mark. From 1986 to 2016, for instance, the scheduled time for a flight from New York’s LaGuardia airport to Miami increased by 39.7 minutes to 198 minutes, according to research by Terence Fan of Singapore Management University. (The distance of 1,097 miles remained the same.)
To get a more accurate picture of which airlines are delivering passengers to their destination as efficiently and quickly as possible, Forbes created a new metric with the consultancy Aerospace Engineering and Research Associates that’s based on actual block time — the time from when the plane’s brakes are released on departure through when the brakes are set at the arrivals gate and the door opens. AERA reviewed all scheduled flights in the U.S. in 2018 and estimated the shortest repeatable flight time for each route.
For instance, the minimum block time for the LaGuardia to Miami route was pegged at 164 minutes. Airlines’ actual flight times varied from an average of 172 minutes (Frontier) to 192 minutes (American). AERA then calculated an efficiency index for each airline based on how close their flights for the year got to their routes’ minimum block times. (For more details on the methodology, click here.)
One airline that comes out looking dramatically better by this measure than the DOT on-time stats is Dallas-based Southwest Airlines. In 2018, Southwest’s domestic flights averaged 12.5 minutes above the minimum achievable times on each route it flew, ranking it second among the ten mainline carriers. Under the DOT’s on-time arrivals ranking, it was fifth. Its efficiency index average is doubly impressive given the scale of Southwest’s operations: it’s the largest domestic carrier with 1.3 million flights in 2018, about 380,000 more than Delta Air Lines.
Southwest flies three to four more flights a day on a given route than many of its competitors, and that requires tighter operations, says Sam Ford, Southwest’s managing director for operations. “Consistent execution on the block is really important for us,” he says. “That’s table stakes for us.”
Southwest pilots also have a reputation of being freer with the throttle to make up time in circumstances where other airlines prefer not to burn more fuel, says Michael Baiada, a former United captain and consultant. “Their pilots are more aggressive, they’re not afraid to fly faster,” he says.
The 10 Major Airlines, From Last To Fastest
* Standard deviation is a measure of how widely performance varies from the average – about 68% of flights were within this number of minutes from the Efficiency Index average.
Where airlines fly can make a big difference in the ranking. Among the ten mainline carriers, Hawaiian ranks first for efficiency, as well as first by the DOT’s on-time rate. Helping it run consistently fast, three quarters of its domestic flights are short hops among the Hawaiian islands, where the weather is usually gentle.
Alaska Airlines suffers the biggest knock, falling to tenth among the ten major U.S. airlines when ranked by how fast it reliably gets passengers to their destination, compared to third by the DOT’s on-time rate. Its average flight in 2018 was 20.7 minutes above the minimum block time. That’s at least partly a function of the two hubs that serve roughly 65% of its flights: Seattle and San Francisco, where its acquisition of Virgin America greatly increased its presence. San Francisco sees frequent inbound delays due to a layer of clouds that flows in off the ocean in the morning and sits over the arrival path at 2,000 to 3,000 feet, while Seattle has gotten more congested due to expanded service by Alaska and Delta.
Alaska also points to the unfavorable location of its gates relative to the usual runway configurations at Los Angeles International, where it says its taxi-out times are five to seven minutes higher than Delta and Southwest’s. Whatever the reasons, it’s posted slower average flight times on a number of major routes than its competitors. (See: “The Fastest Airlines By Route.”)
The Economic Toll Of Inefficiency
The cost of flight delays add up for airlines, their customers and the broader economy: AERA estimates the total damage at $88.8 billion in 2018, based on a 2008 analysis by the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee. (The chart below melds that figure with efficiency index minutes to estimate the costs at an airline and passenger level—see the methodology for an explanation.) A big contributor to those flight delays is the failure to effectively manage the flow of planes arriving at airports, says Lonnie Bowlin, president of Dunkirk, Maryland-based AERA.
A flight that’s 15 minutes early with no gate open for it to go to can be just as disruptive as one that arrives five minutes past the scheduled time, holding up more punctual flights behind it and creating ripple effects that can stack up planes in holding patterns for the rest of the day. Both early and late planes throw off coordination of gates, tugs, jetways and marshals, keeping passengers waiting on planes longer.
Airlines and air traffic control could do more to sort out planes en route to reduce delays. “Who’s late, who’s early, whose gate is available, who’s going to burn more fuel in a holding pattern. This could all be figured out before you get to the arrival approach,” Bowlin says.
Delta, United and American all look slightly worse by their block-to-block times than their on-time arrivals rates. Delta slips to fourth from second, United to eighth from sixth, and American to ninth from seventh.
That’s partly due to their hub-and-spoke model, which funnels passengers from smaller cities to large ones where they connect for flights to other destinations. Those airlines schedule banks of flights to arrive at a hub at roughly the same time to deliver passengers to fill up outbound planes that generally sit waiting longer than planes on point to point routes. That also leads to banks of planes that depart at the same time. If not well coordinated, these waves can lead to delays.
But it’s not the only reason for their worse showing in terms of efficiency — Southwest flies into and among its big competitors’ hubs, and in many cases it does so faster and with more consistent flight times than they do.
For the airlines, tightening up flight times could save fuel and crew costs and give them the chance to add more flights using the same planes. “They’re making good margins now, but they could make a hell of a lot better margins if they flew more efficiently,” says consultant Robert Mann.
The Full Ranking Of The Fastest Airlines
We didn’t just do the math on the ten major airlines. Below are efficiency scores for every scheduled carrier in the U.S. for which data was available, including regional and commuter airlines.
