Airport Performance Calculator
Travelers this summer are likely to encounter the longest delays and most crowded planes in years. To gauge the misery—and help travelers steer around it—U.S. News has crunched several sets of government data to identify the airports and routes where fliers will feel the most pain.
This flight calculator includes data on the 500 most popular domestic routes in the United States. For most of the departure and arrival cities, we’ve tabulated a number of factors that directly affect the kind of experience travelers will have on their journey. We’ve included on-time performance for flights originating at each airport, along with the average “load factor”—the percentage of seats filled on all flights leaving a given airport. We’ve also developed an exclusive Airport Misery Index that measures a combination of delays and crowded planes for 47 large airports and 53 regional airports. (Our rankings are like golf—the lower the number, the better.) And we’ve included the average airfare at each airport, so you can compare the cost of tickets across the nation.
There are a number of important factors nobody can predict, like how long the security lines will be and whether summer thunderstorms will wreak havoc with flights on your day of travel. But these data provide a helpful snapshot of the nation’s air travel choke points, whether you’re planning a trip two months from now or boarding a plane tomorrow.
1. Select Departure
2. Select Arrival
Sources: Dept. of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics; the Boyd Group
Notes: On-time performance data are for the first three months of 2007. Load factor data are for the first two months of 2007. Misery Index rankings are based on a combination of on-time performance and load factor at each airport. (View the methodology.) Airfare data are from the fourth quarter of 2006. Average fares represent domestic itineraries where either a round-trip ticket or a one-way ticket with no return was purchased. For our Misery Index and airfare rankings, the lower the number, the better. Where we’ve indicated that a Misery Index ranking is not available, that’s because the airport is categorized as a regional airport, not a large airport, and the two are not comparable; we’ve also compiled separate Misery Index rankings for regional airports. In all cases, the data is the latest available as of June 1, 2007.
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