The US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced on January 3, that JetBlue Airways is to be fined $2 million for continued flight delays across its network. The move comes despite the carrier being recently voted as one of the ‘Best Airlines in 2024’ as revealed by a survey conducted by US travel website WalletHub. According to the DOT, JetBlue was solely responsible for 70% of its flights that were chronically delayed during the scrutinized period, said the DOT, as it imposed the fine to stamp out the practice of unrealistic scheduling in the US airline industry.    

Having scrutinized JetBlue’s operations since 2022, the DOT found that certain JetBlue flights were subjected to repeated and prolonged delays. Certain US East Coast routes were delayed a total of 395 times between June 2022 and November 2023 which included routes from New York-JFK (JFK) to Raleigh-Durham (RDU),  Fort Lauderdale (FLL), and Orlando (MCO), plus Fort Lauderdale to Bradley International Airport (BDL) in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.

According to the DOT, chronically delaying a flight for more than four consecutive months is “one form of unrealistic scheduling.” Specifically, if a flight is flown at least 10 times in a month and arrives more than 30 minutes late more than 50 percent of the time, the flight is considered to be chronically delayed says the DOT. Flights that are classed as chronically delayed are those that suffer a poor on-time performance month after month with no meaningful reason for the delays.

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