Israelis are not known for their punctuality and the national airline carrier of the country is similarly tardy. A recent report by Flightstats Website, a website that monitors and rates airlines on a number of operational attributes, states that El AL is one of the world’s worst airlines in terms of punctuality. The report, which comes out monthly put El Al third worst in the world for the month of September, and the previous track record isn’t much better.
Of the 41 airlines measured, Egypt Air and Ethiopian Airlines ranked 41 and 40 and El Al ranked 39 as having the most delays of any major airlines.
According to the site, the flight is counted as delayed if it takes off more than 15 minutes past its scheduled departure time. More than 34 percent of EL Al’s flights take off with a delay. September, the month in which the measurement was taken is the busiest month of the year for Israeli tourism with the High Holidays being major draws for travelers. Some 2.2 million people came through Ben Gurion Airport’s doors over the month.
On the flip side of the chart, ranking as the airlines with the fewest delays were SriLankan Airlines, Delta, and the Japanese air carrier ANA.
But one cannot only blame the airline, the airport is also partly to blame as Ben Gurion ranked 351st out of 376 airports for having delayed departures. Only 66% of flights left on time, which is a similar average to the amount of flights that left on time for El Al. There was an average delay of 48.3 minutes of flights coming out of Ben Gurion.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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8 Responses
If I had to guess, the Israeli airline is the one I would have picked. On that note, I bet that Lufthansa is number one in punctuality.
the el al thing is probably true, being that out of the 2 times i flew with them i was delayed once for an hour, but ben gurion is definitely much more efficient than american airports
Will they even attempt to remedy the situation and better their record or like typical Israeli style לא איכפת and let it just roll off!
Maybe we should be dan lekav zechus and assume that these delays are security-related, trying to confuse the soton (in this case chas vesholom, a possible terrorist attack)??
It takes time to reseat the women that the chareidim told to move.
The airport is just small… So often there are trafficking issues. Another YWN article recently stated that Ben Gurion is undergoing an overhaul to make it support more terminals.
Other than that though the little information provided makes me wonder what their data collection methods were.
The only true statistics (seemingly) which I have come across in the past are the ones which detail their methods (how often, limitations [I give them credit for mentioning that they only tested during the busiest season, but they didn’t emphasize it at all in the conclusions], sample size and method of selecting their sample (truly random sample selected through…___), and so on).
I have flown El AL for more than 60 years………….
As long as I can remember the name stands for:
Every
Landing
Always
Late…………………………….
Neither of these findings and ratings will come as any surprise to anyone who flies a lot through Ben Gurion and has the misfortune to occasionally need to fly El Al. Their staff are arrogant and supercilious, their planes are usually dirty and lack careful maintenance, both technical and aesthetic. El Al acts as though it is doing you a favor by graciously agreeing to transport you from A to B despite the fact that their fares are usually higher than the competition. A chutzpah that you expect them to depart and arrive on schedule as well! I recently flew to Israel from New York with Royal Jordanian through Amman. It was a spotlessly clean Dreamliner plane with good kosher food, pleasant helpful staff and guess what, the planes took off and landed when they said they would, except for the connecting flight from Amman to Ben Gurion which landed early.