Airlines avoided lengthy tarmac delays for two straight months near the end of last year, a federal report on airline delays showed.
The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics said November was the second month in a row that airlines had no tarmac delays longer than three hours, following the implementation of a new federal rule aimed at prohibiting tarmac delays earlier in the year.
But the snowstorms that have hit Atlanta and the East Coast this winter will test the tarmac delay rule. Some of the most notorious tarmac delays have occurred during nasty snowstorms like the one that hit Atlanta this week, and which is now headed toward the Northeast.
Airlines have changed their practices to avoid long tarmac delays, including canceling flights ahead of time instead of trying to operate them in difficult conditions. Since the new tarmac delay rule went into effect, airlines reported 12 tarmac delays longer than three hours last May through November, compared with 550 in the same period of 2009.
Airlines have warned that the tarmac delay rule would lead to an increase in cancellations. The federal report showed an increase in the cancellation rate in November to 0.7 percent of scheduled domestic flights, up from 0.5 percent in the previous year.
For the year through November, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport ranked 20th for on-time arrival performance among 29 major airports ranked. Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines ranked 15th for on-time arrival performance in the period among 18 large carriers. Delta also had the highest rate of consumer complaints to the government.
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