Management of airline arrival performance before and after September 11, 2001 in US domestic markets

While an important aspect of airline service quality is on-time arrival performance, increasing on-time reliability while maximizing revenue and minimizing cost is a difficult challenge. This study uses publicly available data to critique the efforts of the top five US airlines to manage domestic on-time performance after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The central question posed in this paper is whether the substantial improvement in airline on-time arrival performance after these events was due to identifiable improvement in airline scheduling and operations or to a large decline in scheduled flights.