Can you get in and out of Fresno Yosemite airport on time? New study charts numbers

Fresno Yosemite International Airport boasted the third-highest on-time performance for arriving and departing flights among mid-sized to large airports across North America last year, a new global aviation analysis reported.

In its “Punctuality League 2023” report, England-based OAG Aviation Worldwide analyzed a full year of flight data to determine the most on-time airlines and airports worldwide, and also broke the data down by region.

At Fresno Yosemite International, almost 81.6% of all arrivals and departures – or more than four out of every five airline flights – were “on time,” meaning they took off or arrived within 15 minutes of the scheduled time. That was the third-best among North American airports behind only Salt Lake City International Airport at 83.6% and Boise Airport at 82.9%.

Rounding out the top five in the OAG analysis were Spokane International Airport and Tucson International Airport, both at about 81.3%.

At many airports across North America, on-time performance for departures and arrivals slipped from pre-pandemic levels, according to the OAG data.

During the pandemic, many airlines parked or decommissioned aircraft, and many airline workers left the industry looking for other work as travel demand evaporated, OAG reported.

Worldwide, “the reopening of air travel began in earnest in April 2022, and this really brought into focus the challenge ahead for the industry as bookings came flooding in, including those for sometimes twice-postponed trips,” wrote OAG’s Dierdre Fulton on the company’s market analysis blog.

“What followed was one of the most challenging periods for the industry across many parts of the world as airports and airlines attempted to facilitate the huge demand for travel, and match resources to demand,” Fulton wrote. “Early in the summer, it became evident that there were just not enough people to enable normal operations to take place at the pace the new demand for travel was setting – a resourcing crisis was underway.”

That crisis was magnified in December when a major winter storm just before Christmas forced airlines in the U.S. to cancel flights by the hundreds nationwide at one of the busiest travel times of the year. Southwest Airlines was particularly hobbled by a meltdown of its operational systems, which prevented the airline from reestablishing its schedule until days after other airlines recovered from the storm’s impacts.

At Fresno Yosemite International, as many as 75% of Southwest’s flights were canceled on Dec. 27, just after the Christmas holiday.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows that 8,241 scheduled airline flights took off from Fresno Yosemite International in the first nine months of 2022. That’s down from 8,873 in the same period of 2021, but well above the 5,828 flights from January through September 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the year before the pandemic, almost 9,500 commercial airline flights took off from Fresno Yosemite International in the first nine months of 2019.

Globally, no U.S. airports ranked among the top 20 for on-time performance in 2022. Each of the top four, seven of the top 10 and 10 of the top 20 were airports in Japan. Three airports in the top 20 were in Brazil, two in South Africa, two in Ecuador, and one each in Panama, India and Peru.