>> I needed to figure out the real reasons why repeat passenger levels had dropped and why the airline ranked #18 for on-time arrivals. > You know what makes m

>> I needed to figure out the real reasons why repeat passenger levels had dropped and why the airline ranked #18 for on-time arrivals. > You know what makes me anxious? Missing my connection because the airline is late AGAIN! I'll suffer through any number of in-cabin discomforts. I'll get out and pull the aircraft back from the gate with a rope. I'll climb in and out via ladders. I'll shovel snow off the runway by hand. I'd even pay a premium on if doing so meant the flight arrives at the time indicated on the ticket. Part of the problem here is that airlines measure departure delays that go into their On Time Performance stat based on the time they leave the gate, when what really impacts customer experience and the potential for missing a connection is takeoff time. So, airlines are willing to have their planes full of passengers stuck in their seats wait on the tarmac indefinitely at the start of the trip, for hours sometimes (US federal rules allow up to 3h for domestic flights, and 4h for international) to halve the impact on their OTP, when passengers would clearly rather the extra time at the start of the trip be spent in the terminal. Now, some of this is unavoidable when any delay (regardless of cause) ripples through the whole airport's landing and takeoff queues (though insufficient slack in the queue is also a cause) but measuring On Time Performance stats in a way that can and is clearly gamed in passenger-hostile ways absolutely makes it worse, and more importantly helps disguise the entity ultimately responsible for the arrival delays that cause missed connections. Based on the simple principle of "you manage what you measure", there are a couple of basic changes that would help to fix this, one is to track stats for takeoff and landing delays, another is to split OTP into separate arrival and departure stats. It would also be nice if airlines were required to track passenger-minutes sitting on the tarmac (though this can be derived if the above changes are made), the % of passenger missed connections, and delay passenger-minutes (so getting bumped to another flight, whether from overbooking or flight cancellation, is still reflected in the stats).