Air Canada’s On Time Record Needs to Improve

I noted in a July post that Air Canada’s service from Toronto to Thunder Bay had been showing some rather erratic performance when it came to on-time arrival.  I monitored performance rather casually for a few weeks later and noticed there were still issues and finally decided to do a more formal monitoring and see what statistics I could come up with.  For the period August 25^th to September 7^th 2019, I noted the scheduled and actual arrival times for the three daily Toronto to Thunder Bay Air Canada flights.  If the flights actually arrived within 15 minutes of their scheduled time, they were deemed to be on time. Otherwise, they were late and the amount of time they were late was also noted. 

The 15-minute window is a pretty standard application of this type of this type of airline performance metric.  If you are looking for a benchmark, Forbes reported on a recent airline performance – the OAG 2019 Punctuality League statistics – and they also use this 15 minute window.  If you are looking for an international benchmark, in the top 20 airlines for on-time performance for all airlines in the report, the top airline was Copa Airlines with a 89.8 percent on time rate (that is arrived within plus or minus 15 minutes of the scheduled arrival nearly 90 percent of the time).  Rounding out the top 20 was Alitalia which was on-time 82.9 percent of the time.   If one only looked at mega airlines, the top 20 ranged from 85.6 percent for LATAM Airlines Group to 66.8 percent for – Air Canada – just below Air China at number 19 with 68.8 percent.  By the way, Westjet had a 76.3 percent on time rate.  Porter did not appear to be included in the report.

Without giving to much away early for the rest of the post, Air Canada’s Toronto to Thunder Bay on time performance during the August 25^th to September 7^th period was pretty abysmal as it did not even meet its low overall on-time performance.  Over this time period, the planes were late 57 percent of the time with an average late arrival of 29 minutes.  You might think that 29 minutes is not so bad – but the time differential ranged from a maximum of 201 minutes (that is 2 hours and 21 minutes late for AC 1512 on September 1^st) to 11 minutes early for AC 1512 the next day.   

 

The accompanying figure plots each flight during this period and at least 8 flights (that is about 20 percent of flights) were at least 50 minutes late.  The only good news is that during this period, there is a slight downward trend in minutes late but there is still a lot of room for improvement.  Keep in mind, aside from the last flight of the day which even if a couple of hours late is able to take off as the first flight the next morning on time – all the late flights coming mean a late flight the other way.  And, this poor performance is during a summer period where there is relatively good weather.  One can only imagine what this winter is going to be like.

So, there you have it.  Air Canada has work to do period but it would be nice if it could bring up its Thunder Bay run performance to at least its overall standard – which is not great by international standards.