It may be too late to change your travel plans this week — barring a blizzard or in-flight breakup — but you can at least prepare yourself for what awaits you in the airport. The math club whiz kids at Fivethirtyeight analyzed the 11 major U.S. airlines across a broad spectrum of data points to determine which airlines were likely to get you where you’re going on time, and which flights stood a good chance of arriving packed with irate, late passengers.
Fivethirtyeight looked at flight data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics concerning airline performance, delays, and the published routes themselves from October 2014 through September of this year to rank the airlines from number one to 11.
Sitting pretty at the top of the speedy, speedy chart is Virgin Atlantic. Passengers flying Sir Richard Branson’s nightclub in the sky are likely to arrive at their destinations seven minutes ahead of schedule. Alaska (six minutes early), Delta (four minutes early) and Hawaiian (three minutes early) trail not far behind.
At the bottom of the pack, averaging 9 minutes behind schedule is Spirit Airlines. United and Frontier will get you to your destination four minutes behind schedule.
US Airways and American ranked separately, as their merger was only recently completed. But bad news for passengers flying on American, the airline is likely to arrive three minutes late. US Airways, now fully absorbed into American, would have likely arrived three minutes early. Here’s hoping some of that punctuality was also soaked up by American.
If you don’t see your airline in the top or bottom here, take a peek at the middle of the pack over at 538’s complete list.