Pinnacle Improves Delta Connection On Time Performance

(MoneyWatch)  Pinnacle Airlines recently put out a press release patting themselves on the back for their on-time performance. Normally I gloss over self-promotion like that, but this time it reminded me that they were embroiled in a fight with Delta over their on-time performance in the past. I thought I'd see how they were doing. Sure enough, they're doing far better.

It's easy enough to look at overall on-time performance, but that doesn't really tell us how they're doing for Delta in particular. So, I went to the Air Travel Consumer Report and looked at Delta's hubs to see where most Pinnacle flying was occurring. The majority is out of Atlanta, but there was some out of Cincinnati as well. Keep in mind there's a little noise here since they do some flying for Northwest out of these cities to Northwest hubs as well, but you get the point. (Besides Northwest=Delta now anyway.)

In my last post, I noted that Pinnacle's Atlanta performance in May was not very good when compared to Delta mainline. They've really improved since then and even passed Delta during some months.

Arrivals within 14 Minutes
	06/2008	07/2008	08/2008	09/2008
Delta Atlanta	78.7%	69.6%	77.5%	85.4%
Pinnacle Atlanta	80.0%	76.7%	78.2%	81.5%
Delta Cincinnati	79.8%	82.8%	90.6%	90.6%
Pinnacle Cincinnati	71.9%	83.7%	90.6%	94.4%

As you can see, things look good for the airline, and that's going to be important for them. Now that Delta and Northwest are gone, they're going to have to make some hard decisions on regional capacity. There are many factors that go into this decision, but you have to think that reliability is certainly a big one.