Source: Chicago Tribune
Author: Gregory Karp

Airline also racked up most complaints from passengers

United Airlines ranked last in on-time performance among large U.S. airlines in July, with more than a third of flights experiencing a delay, according to data released Monday.

United, operated by Chicago-based United Continental Holdings, was on time just 64.1 percent of the time in July, according to the Air Travel Consumer Report released by the U.S. Department of Transportation. No other major network carrier was below 77 percent. On-time is defined by the DOT as arriving within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival.

Weather was not a major factor. Instead, late-arriving aircraft and air carrier delays, meaning circumstances within the airline's control, were most often cited in United's delays in July, according to the report.

United has been struggling since March with a new reservations computer system, which has caused rampant delays. United officials have publicly apologized for delays in recent months and said they are making changes to improve the system.

"A lot has changed in our operations since July," United said in a statement. "So far in September we've succeeded in achieving our 80 percent on-time arrival target. However, we recognize our performance in July was not what our customers expect, and it was not what we want to deliver.  We have taken aggressive action to improve, including adding spare aircraft and more ground time between flights, and making changes to our technology to give employees and customers a more reliable product."  

The July DOT report doesn't reflect massive delays in late August caused by a network outage at United. The airline attributed that to a piece of communications equipment whose backup system also failed.

United's on-time arrival rate to Chicago O'Hare was 63.7 percent in July. The average for all airlines was 71.8 percent.

The report also noted United had numerous flights labeled by the DOT as "chronically delayed," including from O'Hare to Baltimore/Washington International, Ronald Reagan Washington National and Orlando International airports. United topped airlines for the percentage of flights arriving late 70 percent of the time, 3.6 percent.

United was also among the worst for canceled flights, at 2.3 percent, which was better than  only regional jet services ExpressJet and American Eagle.

Maybe not surprisingly, United was by far the most complained-about airline, registering 995 formal complaints from passengers in July, accounting for nearly half of complaints lodged against all U.S. airlines. Top complaint categories for United were reservations-ticketing-boarding and flight problems. Its complaint rate of 11.3 per 100,000 passengers was more than triple its rate from the year before.

"We are aggressively addressing the operational issues that contributed to the high number of complaints," United said in a statement, also noting that one-third of the complaints "relate to the obviously inadvertent, and quickly corrected, publication of a four-mile redemption price for first class tickets to Hong Kong." 

The report also measures mishandled baggage. United was in the middle of the pack for lost luggage, 11th of 15 large U.S. airlines, but was worst among major network carriers. It lost 4.8 bags per 1,000 passengers. The average was 3.5 bags per 1,000.

Among other airlines, the most on-time were Hawaiian Airlines, Alaska Airlines and US Airways.