The 19 largest U.S. carriers tracked by the Transportation Dept. saw their on-time performance improve in September to 86.2%, up from last September’s 84.9%.

It also was a good month for the airlines in terms of the much-publicized tarmac delays–.0001 percent of their scheduled flights had tarmac delays of three hours or more, down from .012 percent in August.

According to DOT’s Air Travel Consumer Report, Hawaiian had the best on-time performance at 94.1%, followed by Alaska (90%), Southwest (89.1%) and Frontier (89.1%). The worst performance was seen by Atlantic Southeast (72.2%), which has been in 18th or 19th place for most of this year.

Atlantic Southeast also had the worst mishandled bag percentage, with 6.12 reports of mishandled bags for every 1,000 passengers. AirTran, Frontier and Hawaiian had the best bag performance, in that order.

Southwest had the fewest consumer complaints at 0.20 per 100,000 passengers, followed by Pinnacle (0.22) and Hawaiian (0.29). Delta had the most complaints at 1.88. For the first nine months of the year Southwest still led, and Delta still trailed all other carriers in the complaint category. For those nine months, Delta received 205 complaints about baggage, 193 about reservations/ticketing/boarding, 183 about flight problems, 122 about customer service and the remainder in other categories.

For complaints filed against foreign airlines, the most went to Air France (88), followed by British Airways (71). Of the 21 foreign airlines named, Qatar received the fewest complaints for nine months at 10.

Photo: Port of Seattle