Question

Airlines have increasingly outsourced the maintenance of their planes to other companies. A concern voiced by critics is that the maintenance may be less carefully done so that outsourcing creates a safety hazard. In addition, flight delays are often due to maintenance problems, so one might look at government data on percent of major maintenance outsourced and percent of flight delays blamed on the airline to determine if these concerns are justified. This was done, and data from 2005 and 2006 appeared to justify the concerns of the critics. Do more recent data still support the concerns of the critics? Here are data from 2014:

Answer 1

According to the information that is found in a different source, the recent data does not support the concerns of the critics. These are the numbers shown in the data:

Airline / Outsource Percent / Delay Percent

Alaska / 51.0 / 10.35

American / 29.4 / 20.32

Delta / 36.7 / 14.48

Frontier / 46.3 / 21.42

Hawaiian / 78.4 / 5.06

Based on this data, we can see that the critics do not seem to be justified in their concerns. We can see that airlines have outsourced much of the maintenance of their planes, but that there does not seem to be a strong correlation between this outsourcing and the percentage of delays. For example, the airline that outsources the most is Hawaiian (78.4%), yet it has the lowest percentage of delayed flights (5.06%).