After writing up my recent 14-hour delay on Hawaiian, GS left a comment asking about the average length of delay for each airline as opposed to just the percentage that are delayed. At the time, I responded “it’s a pretty large and annoying project” for me to pull all those flight-level details, but then I decided… ah, what the heck. Let’s do it. I snuggled up with Anuvu on-time data one night, and now it’s time to talk about the results.
I didn’t want to just look at the average length of delay, because that isn’t entirely telling. It can get skewed. Instead, I decided to create bands of delays to show what percent of flights for each airline fell into each group. Just extracting the data was going to take some time, so I settled on looking at just a single month. Naturally I took the heart of the summer and used this past July.
Before we look at the numbers, keep in mind that these are all by marketing airline, so regionals are included. Now, let’s take a look.
Delay-Length Bands by Marketing Airline – July 2026
Data via Anuvu
The lightest red at the bottom shows arrivals within 14 minutes of schedule (or earlier), so that is the number that most people are used to seeing as a measure of on-time performance. And the numbers aren’t all that surprising with Alaska/Hawaiian in first place thanks to their good operations and more benign weather. Then it’s Delta with United close on its heels.
JetBlue has had a miserable summer, and the weather has just been brutal for them. But they’re always at the bottom. Frontier is bad, no surprise there either. But then there’s Southwest which from this metric made American look good.
On a recent episode of The Air Show, I spoke with Southwest COO Andrew Watterson, and he talked about what the airline was doing to fix its issues. But he also noted that many of the delays were short, and that is important, because it is far less disruptive for travelers. This tells that exact story.
As you can see, Southwest by far had the most delays that fall into the 15 to 60 minute category. Remarkably, if you look at A60 — the two bottom categories combined — Southwest jumps to third place behind Alaska and Hawaiian. (Technically, that’s second place, but I broke out the Hawaiian and Alaska operations to show the differences there.) So Southwest’s delays are annoying, but they aren’t going to be as much of a fire-breathing, anger-spewing, “I hate you x airline” kind of delay, at least 91 percent of the time.
A one to two hour delay is enough to make a lot of people made, and this is where we shouldn’t be surprised to see JetBlue at the top with nearly 10 percent of its flights. Like I said, combine an already weak operation with exceptionally poor weather, and you are going to be in trouble.
Frontier and Allegiant follow, and that’s probably because when things do go wrong, they try as best they can to eventually run a flight. I say “try” since Frontier still canceled 2.8 percent of flights and was below average. But Allegiant succeeded, being the only big airline that canceled fewer than one percent of flights. Allegiant does run a better operation than Frontier pretty consistently. Of the big guys, well, American is worst to the surprise of nobody. United did pretty well for itself.
Now let’s look at the really bad stuff, delays of over two hours. This is where gate agents start to need bodyguards. And sure, JetBlue is again the worst performer followed by Frontier and Allegiant. Shocking, I know. But to be fair, American is actually tied with Allegiant.
Breeze stands out to me here. It was doing fine in the upper middle part of the pack in the one to two hour delay band, but over two hours? It has a lot of those. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.
I would see these are the main takeaways from a big picture perspective:
- JetBlue and Frontier are the biggest problem children
- Southwest has a delay problem, but you won’t be delayed that long
- Of the big three, American is the worst
- Alaska and Hawaiian are doing great, even if my flight was delayed 14 hours
A Regional Look
I did go a little bit deeper on the four airlines that have branded regional flying to see if there were any big differences there. And there were some variations, at least for three of them. Alaska wasn’t all that different whether mainline, SkyWest or Horizon.
For Delta, SkyWest was over 81 percent A14 while Endeavor was under 68 percent. Geography may have something to do with that, but Republic flies all around the northeast too, and it was at 75 percent, so Endeavor looks like a problem. Piling on, Endeavor had nearly eight percent of flights delayed more than two hours while Republic was just over five percent and SkyWest was under four percent.
At United, the script was flipped. Mesa and Commute Air were best at over 80 percent while SkyWest was worst at just over 72 percent. SkyWest and mainline were actually almost the same, actually. Looking at long delays, Mesa was by far the best. It is shocking and somewhat disorienting to be able to say that, but once you’ve retired all those ancient CRJ-900s and focused on relatively new Embraer 175s, I guess that can happen.
And then there’s American which had the biggest swings of all. You know what? Let’s just put this in a visual to look at.
American Airlines Delay Stats by Operating Airline – July 2026
Data via Anuvu
Look at Envoy doing a great job, and then look at both mainline and PSA doing a terrible job. PSA, of course, flies up and down the east coast, so that’s a problem. But guess what… so does Republic.
I know geography goes into a lot of these issues, but Endeavor under Delta and PSA at American look like the regional airlines to avoid if you can.
A New York City Look
I know I keep talking about how geography impacts these results, so let’s take a look at New York City to get a better sense of what I’m talking about. To be clear, everything was bad there, but some were worse than others. For this, I looked at a combined JFK and LaGuardia for American, Delta, and JetBlue. Then for United, I looked at Newark.
NYC Delay Performance by Marketing Airline – July 2026
JFK/LGA for AA/DL/B6 and EWR for UA Data via Anuvu
This tells a story of relative consistency. JetBlue is relatively bad, of course, but that is consistent…. But the big three don’t vary all that much from each other. United is a little better about getting planes in on time, and Delta is a little better at keeping delays shorter. We can pull all of these apart and find their own weak spots, but the point is that systemwide data matters. Just keep in mind that individual airports are going to give different results.
