I have mentioned how frustrating it can be when airlines are late like LIAT. SO which airlines are most reliable for timeliness? Flightstats tracks airline departures and arrivals and they have just released their annual report for 2016. KLM takes out first place overall but they also have categories for regions and low cost carriers. Here’s a sneak peek, then check out Flightstats full report.
For some reason, Etihad isn’t mentioned, I hope that doesn’t mean they are always late!
Flightstats is a very useful website that also has an iPhone & Android app. I’ll be doing several posts to show how to use it to best advantage. For this post, we will look at flight delays.
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The Global Delay section in the “Delays” tabs will tell you which flights are being cancelled or delayed around the world. I typically start monitoring this a few days before my flight to beep track of any potential problems.
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Next I would click on the Asia Pacific tab to see if there are any problems in my upcoming flights. I often do connect through Singapore so seeing it at the top of the Departure Airports list would set off alarm bells and prompt a further investigation.
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Unfortunately Flightstats only collects exact delay information on US airports but there are other things we can look at. Click on the SIN hyperlinked in blue, then click on the Departures tab once you are on the SIN Changi page.
It defaults to the current time with upcoming flights. There are no imminent delays and I want to see why SIN was at the top of the list. I can change the time by either clicking on “Change Airport” or by changing the time slot which I highlighted in yellow.
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Going back to 3pm, I can see a Garuda flight was 6 hours late. Most other flights were on time or just a few minutes delay. That’s good news, the problem wasn’t affecting the entire airport like a weather, air traffic control or similar problem. But if I was traveling on Garuda tomorrow, I would be calling them to double check the late flight wasn’t going to impact on my flight.
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I’m not on Garuda, let’s say I am connecting to Turkish Airlines to fly to Istanbul.
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Luckily, both the flight to Istanbul and the flight from Jakarta are on time. At this point, I would check the arriving flight from Jakarta since apparently TK does a IST-SIN-JKT-SIN-IST itinerary.
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The incoming flight from IST is 16 minutes late which is not a huge problem at Changi. And the plane I will be on which originates in Jakarta is arriving on time so barring any unforseen complications, I can be 99% sure of an on-time flight!
There are some airlines that allow you to easily search award availability on partners such as United, American, ANA, Qantas…………….but sometimes not all partners can be searched, especially partners that are not in the airline’s main alliance. A good example of this is Air Tahiti Nui. You can book their flights with AA miles but you can’t see their availability on AA’s website or any other One World partner’s website since they aren’t a member of One World. In some cases you can use Flightstats to see award availability. On the Flights tab, click on “Availability”.
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For this example, business class is not available (I = 0) but there are 7 seats in economy (W = 7).
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While Flightstats doesn’t have a guide for every airport in the world, they do have most of the major airports. You can always Google the name of the airport to find the airport’s official website for greater details but the Flightstats are available on iPhone & Android apps which may be more convenient.
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On the Airports tab, click on Airport Terminal Guide. Since Qatar Airways joined One World, some of us may be using Doha as a transit point so let’s go to the Middle East tab and see what the airport has to offer. Maybe they have a lounge we can use or some good shopping.
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The map on Flightstats isn’t very good but we can see a few lounges (L) On the Overview tab, they have a link to the official website where we can get more details.
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And yes, there is a pay per use lounge we can use if we wish.
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This is another great use of Flightstats. If you have various options for an award ticket and you want to avoid flights that are notorious for being late or cancelled, check this. On the Flightstats home page, click on the Flights tab, then “On-time Performance”. Type your route into the appropriate boxes.
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Now let’s see which flights have the best on-time record. Ignore the codeshares and just look at the actual airlines who are operating the flights. Look at the percentage of flights on time and how many minutes the delayed flights lost.
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Those last two AA flights are a worry. In both cases the average delay was around an hour and between 57-73% of flights experienced some delay. None of them were cancelled so at least that is good. But if my final destination was elsewhere in Brazil, I would be leaving a very generous layover to make that connection!
If you click on AA929 at the bottom of the display, you can get more details. 17 out of 61 flights were either very late or excessive.
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I will be going into greater detail in other posts regarding some of the great features of FlightStats but for now, get this free app! If you ever get delayed, find yourself stranded in an airport or need to track a flight, you will be very glad you have it!
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