What to Know About Flight Delays and Cancellations This Summer

More people flew out of airports in the United States on Sunday — 2.46 million according to the Transportation Security Administration — than on any other day so far this year. The Fourth of July holiday is expected to be even busier, with Hopper, a travel booking app, predicting that nearly 13 million passengers will fly to, from and within the United States this weekend.

The question for many travelers is whether they can trust airlines to get them where they want to go on time.

You could not blame them for assuming the answer is no. On June 17, the Friday before the Monday Juneteenth holiday, nearly a third of flights arrived late, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking company. Between last Saturday and Monday ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, U.S. carriers already canceled nearly 2,500 flights. In a June 16 meeting, Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, told airlines that he’d be closely monitoring their performance. The very next day, his own flight from Washington to New York was canceled.

In a letter on Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders urged Mr. Buttigieg to begin fining airlines for particularly egregious cancellations and delays. Among other proposals, he suggested that airlines should pay $55,000 per passenger for any canceled flight that it was clear in advance they could not staff.

Before postponing any upcoming trip, though, it’s worth taking a close look at cancellation and delay data for insights into how travel has, and has not, changed this year.

Percentage of cancellations so far this year vs. a comparable time in 2019: 2.8 percent vs. 2.1 percent.

Lesson: The idea that air travel was so much better before the pandemic may be clouded by nostalgia for Before Times.

Social media is filled with declarations that air travel is the worst it’s ever been. Indeed on some holiday weekends and stormy weeks it’s been astoundingly bad. As Mr. Sanders noted in his letter, airlines have canceled flights four times as often on high-travel weekends as they did in 2019. But the reality is that airline reliability was pretty terrible even before the pandemic.

U.S. airlines have been operating somewhere between 21,000 and 25,000 flights a day in recent months. So far in 2022, an average of one of out five flights a day arrived behind schedule — a total of more than 820,000 delayed flights according to FlightAware. More than 116,000 flights have been canceled. All of this adds up to tens of thousands of people missing weddings,…