RIC’s December air travel melts

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Data: BTS;  Chart: Kavya Beheraj/Axios
Data: BTS; Chart: Kavya Beheraj/Axios

If you’ve traveled over the holidays and experienced flight delays, you’re not alone.

Game Mode: 74.2% of domestic flights departed Richmond Airport on time in December 2022, reports Alex Fitzpatrick and Kavya Beheraj of the US Department of Transportation.

  • This is down from 82.6 percent in November 2022, according to recently released data from the department’s Bureau of Transport Statistics (BTS).

The big picture: Nationally, only 69 percent of December flights departed on time.

  • That figure is generally between 75%-80% in a typical month, though predictably during the busy – and often meteorologically challenging – summer and winter travel seasons.

driving news; The real story in December was the spectacular failure of Southwest Airlines.

  • 61.4% of Southwest flights departed RIC on time in December.
  • Only 57.3% of Southwest’s December flights were on time nationally, compared to 77.2% for Delta Air Lines, 72.5% for American Airlines and 70.7% for United Airlines.
  • Southwest’s struggles lowered the average for all carriers reporting data to BTS.

Yes, but: All signs so far point to the Southwest recovering well since December, although the BTS data is about three months late.

  • The airline has pledged to modernize key systems that worsened December’s slump, as well as to better communicate with passengers whose flights were delayed or canceled in the future.

What they say: “We’ve spent a lot of money on technology and recently put in a new state-of-the-art maintenance system, a new reservation system and a new human capital workday system,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan told Axios’ Eleanor Hawkin.

The main point is: December was actually as bad as it sounds, the data shows.

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