"Airport delay survey drops Lambert"

Monday, October 17, 2005

Airport survey drops Lambert
By Tim McLaughlin
The St. Louis (MO) Post-Dispatch


A monthly report that tracks late flights at U.S. airports will not include
data for Lambert Field next year, the U.S. Transportation Department said
Monday.

That's because Lambert didn't board enough passengers in 2004 to meet the
report's minimum threshold. Lambert and Portland, Ore., International
Airport each did not account for at least 1 percent of the nation's total of
629 million passengers boarded in 2004.

Those two airports will be dropped from the Transportation Department's
monthly Air Travel Consumer Report, which currently tracks on-time
performance at 33 airports. The number of passengers boarded at Lambert
plummeted in late 2003 when American Airlines cut more than 200 daily
flights.

Lambert missed the report's cutoff by 70,000 passengers, with airlines at
the airport reporting 6.22 million passengers boarded in 2004, the Bureau of
Transportation Statistics said. Lambert boarded about 10.2 million
passengers in 2003.

The on-time performance report for airports is published about 30 days after
the end of a month in the Air Travel Consumer Report. Lambert's data won't
be broken out separately when the report for January is released, statistics
bureau spokesman Dave Smallen said.

For the first eight months of this year, Lambert ranked No. 7 for on-time
arrival performance among the 33 reporting airports. The statistics bureau
said 79.79 percent of Lambert flights arrived on-time during the period,
compared with 79.52 percent in the year-earlier period.

Lambert can get back on the monthly report if its passenger boardings meet
the 1 percent threshold next year, Smallen said.

Attached Photo:

Lambert Field

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