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Spirit Airlines Doesn't Pad Its Schedule -- And It's Last In On-Time

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In the first quarter on-time statistics from the U.S. Transportation Department, Spirit Airlines didn’t look so good.

Among the 12 airlines ranked for on-time performance, Spirit finished last with just 65.3% of flights on time, 17 points below the industry average of 82.1% on-time arrivals. Six airlines were below average: six were above.

On the Spirit earnings call in April, CEO Bob Fornaro discussed solutions to Spirit’s operational issues: he said the carrier plans to redesign the schedule in the fall, and also noted that new dispatching software had hindered performance in the first quarter.

But also, Fornaro noted, Spirit doesn’t pad its schedule in order to enable more on-time arrivals. “If we were able to in one quarter make a dramatic improvement, it would be all ‘pad and all gloss,’” he said. “It just simply is paying more money to show a good performance without fundamentally turning the airplanes any faster.

“Over time, we'll improve our turn performance and we'll do it with slightly higher block times than we do today, but not bloated block times,” Fornaro said.

In an interview, Spirit spokesman Paul Berry said, “We have an extremely tight schedule compared to the rest of the industry. If things like weather or airport issues, things that are out of our control, come up, that can cause delays.

“But {tight schedules} allow us to keep our fares low, much lower than the rest of the industry,” he said.

Spirit’s daily aircraft utilization is between 13 and 14 hours, Berry said. By contrast, utilization at the three global airlines is closer to 10 or 11 hours, largely because hub systems require that aircraft spend a lot of time on the ground waiting for passengers to connect between flights and then waiting to depart.

As for Southwest,  which does not operate a hub system, its 2015 utilization was 11 hours, 13 minutes per aircraft.

Spirit’s Berry said, “We have a network approach, rather than a hub approach. {Additionally,} when there is a weather issue, that can make it more challenging. We don’t have the frequencies others have: we won’t cancel a flight to get back on schedule.”

Because Spirit often has just one flight a day in a given market, it cannot cancel a flight and put passengers on the next departure because there is no next departure.  In that situation, Spirit is more likely to have a late arrival.

In general, the belief in the airline industry is that on-time arrivals are the key to enhancing customer satisfaction – passengers arrive on time, they don’t miss connections, and the number of mishandled bags diminishes. As a result, airlines have worked hard to be on time.

Two weeks ago, a J.D.Power survey found that North American airline passengers are more satisfied than they have been since 2006. The survey was the third in two months to show increased passenger satisfaction.

But as Fornaro says, improved on-time performance costs money. It generally includes increasing block time, the time from when the brakes are released and the plane leaves the gate until the time when the brakes are set on arrival. Increased block time means the airline spends more on crew costs and also that the aircraft spends fewer hours per day flying.

American is among the carriers leading the on-time effort, although it ranked seventh in the first quarter, with an 81.1% on-time performance, behind principal rivals Delta at 86.6% and United at 83.1%. American’s on-time rate has diminished recently due to the continuing logistical complications of merging with US Airways.

At a recent investor conference, American President Scott Kirby said the carrier in fact focuses on a different on-time measure, D-0, or departures at the exact scheduled time, which is a more accurate measure of airline performance than A-14, or arrivals within 14 minutes of schedule, which is what the Transportation Department measures. “You can always pad the block time and make the arrivals better,” Kirby said.

Berry noted that Spirit’s on-time performance has improved since the first quarter: on-time arrivals reached 73% in April and 74% in the first half of May.

And Berry did not rule out the possibility that Spirit might consider increasing block time in the future. “We’re looking at everything to improve our on-time performance without adding extra costs to our customers’ fares,” he said. The changes might include increased utilization, scheduling changes and more back-up aircraft, he said.