This was named the best airport in America — and you've probably never heard of it
We're down to the last pages on our calendars, which means it's time for those year-end lists to start appearing online, the ones that rank everything from the most overplayed songs to the best memes to the biggest celebrity breakups. But the analysts at Travelmath.com ignored Jen and Ben and Gavin and Gwen and focused on the best and worst commercial airports in the United States, ranking all 322 of them based on their performance in six categories
According to its methodology, Travelmath examined data from the Bureau of Transportation for the eight months between January 1 and August 31, 2015. It then used that information to rank each of those 322 airports in six categories: the percentage of delayed flights and canceled flights; the average length of those delays; the average taxi time; the average fare cost; and the number of TSA claims for broken, lost or stolen items. Cristina Lachowyn, a Travelmath spokesperson, told Yahoo Travel:
"This is really a gold mine of data that we have from the federal government, but it really wasn’t organized in a way that was useful to travelers. There was just so much information out there. So we decided to put it all together in a way that would be useful and relevant and easy for people to get an actionable takeaway from."
The top-ranked airports might surprise you, mainly because you might not have heard of them. The top 10 airports are all located in five western states — Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana and Utah — and all of them serviced less than 1,000 flights this year. The weekly flight schedule at the No. 1 airport, Canyonlands Field in Moab, Utah, for example, only includes four Utah Airways flights to Salt Lake City and back. The No. 2 airport, Cedar City Airport in Cedar City, Utah, operates a dozen flights to and from Salt Lake City.
Meanwhile, all three New York-area airports are in the bottom 10 and Newark-Liberty International Airport came in dead last, ranking No. 322 out of 322. Washington-Dulles, Chicago O'Hare and Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport were all at the bottom of the list.
But based on Travelmath's analysis, the smaller facilities had a significant advantage over the larger ones. Fewer flights and fewer passengers mean that there are fewer opportunities for things to go awry. So, to be fair, it also compiled separate Top 10 lists for airports based on their flight volumes. By those calculations, the best large airports (those with more than 75,000 flights) were Seattle-Tacoma, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Phoenix Sky Harbor.
"You have so much air traffic and it’s such a huge operation for some of these [big] airports," Lachowyn said. "You really got to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges."
Regardless, when it comes to airports, it seems like the Big Apple still has the worst apples.