America’s most hated airline wants to fix one thing: Being on time

Spirit Airlines is the carrier that leads the pack when it comes to customer gripes. With that in mind, its new boss is trying to repair one crucial aspect of the business: getting to your destination on time. Spirit operated only 68% of its flights on time for the 12 months ended April 2016, as defined by the US metric of a flight that gets to the gate within 14 minutes of scheduled arrival. CEO Bob Fornaro says he’s been focused on reliability since his first day on the job six months ago. So has his board: In January, they amended executive compensation plans for 2016 to give on-time rate a 20% weighting in calculating managers’ bonuses, up from 10%. “Over the years, we’ve never put enough emphasis on service,” Fornaro said June 20. Now that’s changing. Spirit’s official on-time showing improved to 73.8% in April but was still the worst in the US airline industry and almost 11 percentage points below the average, according to the most recent DoT statistics. Spirit also cancelled a higher percentage of its flights in April than any other carrier — 1.7%. Amid all these operational fixes, though, Spirit doesn’t want to get too good at showing up on time: A high on-time percentage can be expensive, especially for an ultra-low-cost operator. Getting closer to the 90th percentile means allotting more time for flights and ensuring everything goes right on the ground. Some airline experts equate it to “buying” on-time performance. <br/>