Delta On-Time Performance Lags in November

(MoneyWatch)  The November on-time report is out, and instead of repeating the stats that you've seen posted elsewhere (including the Air Travel Consumer Report itself), I thought I'd look at some of the outliers. This month, that means Delta.

Once again, November was a great month for on-time performance. Just wait until the December report comes out - that's gonna be an ugly one. But for this month, nearly everyone was over 80 percent on time with a couple notable exceptions. At the bottom of the heap, we see Delta and its regionals Comair and Atlantic Southeast as the only ones to be under 80 percent systemwide. To be fair, they were all still above 75 percent, so it wasn't too shabby. But what happened here to cause them to lag?

It appears that Atlanta was the culprit here. On time performance in Atlanta was only 76 percent across all airlines and 75.5 percent for Delta. With over 13,000 arrivals on the Delta in the month, when Atlanta has problems, so does all of Delta. Interestingly, Delta was able to maintain a 77.2 percent arrival rate at JFK, which is stellar for that place. It seems that only 7 days out of the month in Atlanta had rain, and only one day had thunderstorms, so that shouldn't have done it. I wonder if it could have involved some scheduling issues?