In Defense of Northwest Airlines

So I have this search set up on my computer that sends me alerts when any article that mentions Northwest Airlines is published on line. This also includes Blog mentions and many times I'll click through to see what is going on. Obviously it isn't always the best review of our product as that is the nature of the beast. When a company or an individual meet our positive expectations we tend to believe it is what we should expect and it is rarely talked about while falling short of the expectations can lead to incredible frustrations by the customer. Furthermore in a twist, expectations that one is about to have an unpleasant situation amplifies the bad experiences and oftentimes make situations seem worse than they really are.

While I won't argue with individual bad experiences as I know that they happen I do take exception that airlines are failing badly. Here are some interesting stats that we were given over the weekend.
Definitions--Load Factor means the amount of seats occupied vs. the amount of seats available. For example, on July 2nd, 86% of all the seats NWA had for sale were occupied. I can promise you if companies in other industries sold that large of a percentage of their product everyday there would be a great problem.
The other number is completion. Completion is the number of flights that operate vs. the number that are scheduled to operate. This number takes into consideration all flights including flights impacted by weather, crew, and maintenance. For example, on July 5th nwa completed every single flight in its schedule. Now this obviously doesn't mean that no flight was late or that everyone made their connecting flights but it is an impressive feat to get approximately 1400 flights a day to loaded, unloaded, catered, fueled, staffed, and safely into the air and back to the arriving destinations gate. NWA has completed this accomplishment 13 times this year and is on pace to beat the all time nwa record set just last year.

Date Load Factor Completion
7/02/08 86.0% 98.4%
7/03/08 88.1% 98.6%
7/04/08 77.6% 99.9%
7/05/08 81.1% 100.0%

Furthermore nwa has done this without compromising safety and while keeping its number one position in both on time performance AND luggage. All and all, a pretty impressive stat.
The one thing I would ask is how many times YOU can be sure of where you'll be within 15 minutes from six months out?
Just some thoughts. Feel free to express your outrage with me on it.


An addendum...
This post was started a few days ago but just finished this afternoon. This morning NWA joined a growing list of airlines and added a $15 charge for the first checked bag (which I absolutely hate) and will cut 2,500 jobs as it shrinks by about 9.5% this fall.