The federal government gave JetBlue Airways (JBLU-0.91%) an ignominious distinction Friday, announcing that it was the first-ever airline to be penalized for frequent runway tardiness. The carrier will have to pay the Department of Transportation $2 million as punishment.
“Illegal chronic flight delays make flying unreliable for travelers. Today’s action puts the airline industry on notice that we expect their flight schedules to reflect reality,” outgoing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement accompanying the announcement. “The department will enforce the law against airlines with chronic delays or unrealistic scheduling practices in order to protect healthy competition and ensure passengers are treated fairly.”
The consent order laying out the how and why of JetBlue’s penalty explains that the company operated four “chronically delayed” flights between June 2022 and November 2023, meaning a route “operated at least 10 times a month and arrives more than 30 minutes late (including cancelled flights) more than 50 percent of the time during that month.” One of the flights, from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Windsor Locks, Connecticut, fit that definition for six consecutive months between June and November 2023.
In a statement provided to Quartz, JetBlue said “we appreciate how important it is to our customers to arrive to their destinations on-time.” The company also sought to push some of the blame on the government itself:
We believe accountability for reliable air travel equally lies with the U.S. government, which operates our nation’s air traffic control system. The U.S. should have the safest, most efficient, and advanced air traffic control system in the world, and we urge the incoming administration to prioritize modernizing outdated ATC technology and addressing chronic air traffic controller staffing shortages to reduce ATC delays that affect millions of air travelers each year.
The development is slightly ironic given that the aviation analytics firm Cirium said JetBlue was the seventh-most on-time airline in North America in 2024. That said, its planes arrived to their destinations on-schedule just 74.5% of the time.
The Department of Transportation, which also monitors on-time arrival performance, said in November that between January and September last year JetBlue’s planes landed on schedule just 71.3% of the time. May was its worst month in 2024, when that figure dropped to just 60.4%.
In a move heavily criticized by the airline industry, the Biden administration instituted new rules requiring airlines to compensate passengers when their flights are heavily delayed or cancelled.
Half of the JetBlue penalty will go to the Treasury, the other half will go into a compensation fund for passengers “harmed by either the chronically delayed flights covered by the DOT’s order or any future flight cancellations or delays of three hours or more caused by JetBlue within the next year.” The payouts from said fund will be $75 per customer at minimum.
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