The On-Time Machines: Some Analyses of Airline Punctuality

The Department of Transportation (DOT) rates commercial airlines' on-time performance every month, but its ratings may unfairly penalize airlines that disproportionately fly into airports at which it is inherently more difficult to land in on-time. We propose several rating methods that we consider more equitable and apply them to 36 months of DOT data. Rating airlines' promptness is an example of the more general problem of evaluating players who compete in overlapping but not identical sets of tournaments, where there is no exogenous knowledge about the quality of the players or the “difficulty” of the tournaments.