The new year started out with a new North American carrier in the top spot for on-time performance, according to aviation analytics company Cirium's latest monthly report.
Southwest Airlines ranked first out of the 10 reporting carriers with a January on-time performance of 83.3 percent, an increase of 4.3 percentage points from December 2024.
Delta Air Lines had taken the top spot in 15 of the past 16 months, with the exception of July 2024, due to the CrowdStrike IT outage. In January, it landed in fourth at 81.1 percent, gaining just 0.9 percentage points month over month.
Alaska Airlines was second at 82.6 percent, followed by Spirit Airlines at 81.1 percent. Though the latter's score is the same as Delta's due to rounding, Spirit edged out the Atlanta-based carrier by 0.07 percentage points.
Overall, the North American airlines' on-time performance improved over December's figure, with an average of 77.9 percent, up from the 74.8 percent reported last month. All but one carrier had an improved month-over-month score. Frontier Airlines' average dropped 2.4 percentage points to 73.1 percent, but it still came in ahead of WestJet and Air Canada, even though those carriers' figures improved 5.6 percentage points and 6 percentage points, respectively, month over month.
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Delta was the only North American carrier to make the top performing global airlines list, in ninth.
Spirit was the only carrier with a January completion factor of 99 percent or better. Alaska was second at 98.9 percent, followed by Southwest and Delta at 97.4 percent and United Airlines at 97.2 percent.
The number of January flight cancellations soared to 20,885, up from the 7,045 reported in December.
A flight is considered on time if the aircraft arrives at the gate within 15 minutes of its scheduled arrival time.
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