Bound to Boston

With The New York Times prominently displaying Maine’s nation-leading tax burden this summer and the Financial Times of London writing about the state’s economic stagnation, why wouldn’t USA Today publish back-to-back days of graphics announcing Bangor International Airport as having the nation’s worst performance record in June? One reason might be that the statistic could well be wrong.

Whether the information USA Today relied on, which came from the Department of Transportation, is accurate is difficult to assess. This is because the arrival and departure data come from only major carriers, which, as anyone trying to fly out of Bangor can attest, are scarce around here. BIA officials estimate that only about 30 percent of their flights – the worst ones, to Boston – are counted in the performance report. Worse, the Transportation statistics don’t sort out the airports by size, so the winner in the departures category for June was an airport in Greenbrier, W.Va., which boasted a 100 percent on-time rate – for the 13 departures reported. (Bangor had 319 departures, still tiny by major airport standards.)

BIA officials acknowledge that they have

a problem in trying to get passengers to Boston and that June was a horrendous month, with on-time arrivals at 38 percent and departures, 56 percent. But the numbers should tell them something more. Bangor’s numbers, for June and other months this year, aren’t just bad, they are exceptionally bad. BIA on-time rates generally fall into the 60s. But other airports, large and small, even during poor months do considerably better than that. Their scores are in the high 70s to mid-80s, with plenty in the 90s.

If, in fact, the Transportation numbers represent even a general sense of performance and Boston is the source of Bangor’s problem, Logan Airport is not only treating BIA badly, but is likely treating it worse than other small airports and far worse than the way other hubs treat small airports elsewhere in the country. It might be worth driving down there to find out why.