Scott McCartney, Aviation Consultant and Adjunct Professor
Duke University
For airlines, the word of the year was resiliency. Carriers faced delays from telecommunications equipment failures in control towers at the busiest airports in the country, including Newark, Denver, Houston, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth. In some cases, controllers couldn’t talk to pilots for terrifying minutes, forcing diversions and ground stops.
In all, the FAA said flight-delay minutes due to equipment issues were about 300% higher in 2025 than the average of 2010-2024. On top of that, a six-week U.S. government shutdown led to shortages of air-traffic controllers and widespread delays and schedule reductions.
Delta Air Lines remained #1 in North America in 2025, but its on-time arrival rate was down more than two percentage points from the previous year. United Airlines, hit hard by multiple telecommunication outages affecting its Newark International Airport hub, dropped from second-place in North America in 2024 to fourth place in 2025.
There were some improvements. Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, which was largely isolated from much of the FAA equipment failures, moved up to #2 from third-place the previous year. Even more remarkable was a major improvement by Spirit Airlines, achieved third-place despite a return to bankruptcy-court protection during the year. Spirit posted an on-time rate of 78.83%, up from about 76.05%, as employees clearly stayed focused on running the airline reliably even as its financial future was uncertain.
Canadian airlines also showed significant reliability improvement, with both WestJet and Air Canada posting roughly two-percentage-point increases in on-time performance.
American Airlines has been trying hard for years to improve its reliability and catch up to Delta and United. But American took a step backwards in 2025 with all the ATC outages, including a cut telecommunications cable near the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, its largest hub, that disrupted flights on a busy weekend. The FAA said a backup system failed along with the primary system. American was so frustrated that it issued a statement blasting the telecommunications provider for not responding to the problem with appropriate urgency.
For the year, American dropped to #6 from #4 as it got fewer than 77% of its flights to the gate on-time, down from just under 78% in 2024.
