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Alaska Airlines Leads New List Of Best Performing Airlines

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Alaska Airlines landed more than nine out of ten flights on-time in February, according to global flight and airport information service provider FlightStats, which tracks the performance of over 150,000 flights per day from hundreds of airlines worldwide.

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines led the major North American airlines in February, boasting 90.56% on-time performance. Delta Airlines placed second with 86.35% of its flights on time, followed by Southwest Airlines (85.54%), US Airways (82.92%), United Airlines (82.09%), American Airlines (79.92%) and JetBlue (71.76%). On average all North American airlines --large and small-- delivered 79.04% of their flights to the gate within 15 minutes of schedule, down a bit from 79.21% in January.

Alaska's strong performance may have been helped by the fact that one of its hubs, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) was the best performing major international airport in February, according to FlightStats' tracking of on-time departures, with 91.18% of departures occurring on-time.

Tokyo's Haneda Airport placed second among international airports with 90.83% on time departures, followed by Phoenix (PHX) with 87.66%, Los Angeles (LAX) with 85.27%, and San Francisco (SFO) with 84.28%. The average on-time departure performance among the top 35 international airports in February was 73.29%, down slightly from January’s rate of 74.73%.

Among all major international airlines, South African Airways led the pack with 94.71% of all flights reaching the arrival gate on time. Gulf Air came in second with 90.77% on-time performance, and Japan Airlines placed third with 90.24%. Industry-wide, the major international airlines on average delivered 77.64% of their flights to the arrival gate within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time. That figure is down just slightly from 78.27% in January.

More details from the February 2013 On-time Performance Report are available on FlightStats.com.

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