USA: Delta Sets New Company Records This Summer

Delta Air Lines (Atlanta) is celebrating a very successful summer season. The airline has issued this statement concerning its operational performance this summer:

The airline faced an incredibly busy summer, and Delta people responded by setting operations records.

The final tallies from Delta’s busiest-ever summer operation are in. And they’re impressive, to say the least.

The marquee standouts are eight new records never achieved by Delta in its long history.

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at the laundry list of achievements during the summer flight season, which began June 4 and ended this week (Aug. 17):

99.79 percent: A summer schedule mainline “completion factor” record. Previous record was 99.74 percent set last year. Completion factor means days without a canceled flight.
21: The record number of 100 percent mainline Delta system completion factor days in a summer schedule. Previous was 16 days, set last year.
139.2 hours: Longest streak of consecutive hours without a cancellation during a summer schedule, which ran from the evening of June 25 through the afternoon of July 1. That shattered the previous record of 80.3 hours set in June 2014.
3,202 flights: The record number of mainline Delta departures made in a single day, which was set at the end of the grueling schedule: on Aug. 17.
614,159: Number of passengers enplaned in a single day across the system, including Delta Connection flights, set on July 31.
96.72 percent: Record on-time departure performance driven by Delta Technical Operations. The previous high of 96.69 percent was set last year.
99.97 percent: Record maintenance completion factor. Put another way, only 0.03 percent of mainline scheduled operations this summer occurred due to a maintenance reason. Previous high of 99.96 percent was set in 2014.
45 days: Record number of days this summer without any maintenance cancelations. Previous record was 26 in 2014.

These records are particularly noteworthy because of the heavier workload this summer. Consider:

Total daily mainline flights were up nearly 10 percent compared to last summer, averaging 3,043 daily departures.
Mainline arrivals exactly on-time or early were up 1.27 percentage points compared to last summer even with the higher volume.
Delta Connection reliability finished strong. Across flights operated by Delta’s six regional partners during the summer, more than 1,600 fewer cancelations were incurred compared to last year.