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Touchdown Index: press notes

The Touchdown Index ranks airlines and airports by how often their flights land on time, from public flight-tracking data, checked against official US figures. These notes cover September 2026, the latest complete month.

Headline findings, September 2026

  • 858,747 flights tracked and scored; 79.7% landed within 15 minutes of their usual arrival time and 5.5% were more than an hour late.
  • Most punctual large airline (5,000+ flights): Austrian Airlines, 88.8% on time.
  • Least punctual large airline: Ryanair, 68.2% on time, with 15.8% of flights more than an hour late.
  • Most improved since August 2026: Air France, up 5.9 points to 83.6%.
  • Most punctual large airport for arrivals: Seoul (ICN), 86.8%.

Full tables: September 2026 league table · CSV · JSON (all months)

The method in three lines

  1. Aircraft broadcast their position (ADS-B); volunteer receivers collect it and adsb.lol publishes it daily as open data.
  2. Each flight number that repeats on a route at least 5 times has a usual arrival time, the median of its landings.
  3. A flight is on time if it lands no more than 15 minutes after its usual time. Airlines need 300 scored flights to be ranked.

Because it compares each landing with the flight's own norm rather than the published timetable, Touchdown Index figures read higher than official on-time rates. Compare airlines with each other, not with official percentages. Full method and limits.

How we know it works

For July 2026 we matched 335,108 tracked US flights to the US Department of Transportation's official on-time records. The two agreed on whether a flight was on time or late for 86.1% of flights, and ranked airlines in nearly the same order (rank correlation 0.964). We set the publication thresholds (80% agreement, 0.7 correlation) before the first test.

Using the data

The data is free to use under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Book&Fly Touchdown Index” and link to bookandfly.co/flight-data/touchdown-index/.

To embed the September 2026 league table on your page:

<iframe src="https://bookandfly.co/flight-data/touchdown-index/embed/2026-09/" title="Touchdown Index: airline on-time league table, September 2026" width="100%" height="560" style="border:0" loading="lazy"></iframe>

Questions, a different cut of the data (a country, an airport, a route) or an interview: hello@bookandfly.co.