The Best & Worst Airlines in the United States
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) states that approximately 499 million people boarded one of the ten major U.S. carriers to fly domestically within the United States in 1999 (Bowen & Headley, 2000). This number does not include the almost 55 million people that boarded a flight in the US on route to an international destination. Furthermore, regional and commuter carriers accounted for an additional approximately 57 million passengers flying domestic routes. This brings to approximately 611 million the total number of people boarding a plane in the US in 1999. And looking to the future, the FAA forecasts that domestic passenger travel will increase, on average, between 3 percent and 4 percent each year for the next 12 years, which means that domestic travel could reach 1 billion passengers by the year 2011 (Bowen & Headley, 2000).
Thus, while airline service is often successful at getting huge numbers of people where they want to go, the sheer capacity and complexity of the enterprise is vulnerable to numerous errors and disruptions that can cause problems for a relatively large number of people. So, although airlines like to point to their overall success in transporting passengers to emphasize that problems are relatively infrequent--for example, in 1998 Northwest had 2.21 complaints per 100,000 passengers--with half-a-billion passenger boardings, problems add up (Spencer, 1999, p. 43). Moreover, airlines that perform well in some categories of service quality do not perform as well in others--Delta, for example, had one of the larger bumping rates as well as one of the best on-time arrival rates (Spencer, 1999, p. 43).
This paper will consider what "best" and "worst" really mean in terms of the airline ratings determined by the Airline Quality Rating (AQR). Furthermore, the paper will question the elements and measures used to determine those ratings as a mean...