Busiest Weekday Against Quietest at Big Hubs

Summary

18 of 20 large airports had a lower on-time rate on their busiest weekday than on their quietest; the median difference is -3.2 points. Across the hubs 75.6% of flights on the busiest weekdays landed on time against 78.9% on the quietest.

Airports schedule fewer flights on some weekdays than on others. This report takes the 20 covered airports with the most scheduled departures and finds, for each, the weekday with the most flights a day and the weekday with the fewest. It then puts the share of flights on time on those two days side by side. The weekdays that are busiest at the most hubs are Friday, Monday and Sunday, and those quietest at the most hubs are Saturday and Tuesday. The counts show whether the busy day ran later. They do not show why.

Sorted from the largest drop to the largest gain. Flights a day is scheduled departures on that weekday divided by how many of that weekday fall in the months loaded. On time is flights that landed within 15 minutes of schedule over flights that completed, taken from the hub’s row for that weekday. Difference is the busiest weekday’s rate less the quietest weekday’s.

Counts are over the 20 hubs in the table above.

A busy weekday is also a different mix of flights: more leisure travel on weekends, more business travel midweek, different routes and different airlines. A gap between two weekdays can come from that mix and not from crowding. The comparison uses one busiest and one quietest day per hub, so it ignores the five between them, and the rank correlation across all seven is given in the key findings for that reason. Airports are included when they are among the 20 largest covered airports by scheduled departures and have at least 1,000 scheduled departures on every weekday. Weather, strikes and holidays sit unevenly across weekdays in a period this long, and nothing here removes them. Cancelled and diverted flights are left out of the on-time rates.