On-Time Performance, Delays & Compensation
Two numbers puzzle almost every growing airline in Tailwinds: why do so many flights show up delayed, and why is the "delay & cancellation payouts" line on the finance screen so large? They're the same story. This guide explains what sets your on-time rate, how delays turn into a weekly bill, and exactly what to change to shrink both.
What on-time performance is
Every airline in Tailwinds has an on-time rate — the share of its flights that operate on schedule. Its mirror image is your delay rate, which is simply everything that isn't on time. If your on-time rate is 80%, then 20% of your flights are running late or being cancelled. That single figure does two jobs: it feeds your quality score (punctual airlines attract more passengers and can charge more), and it drives the compensation you owe when things go wrong.
What sets your on-time rate
Your on-time rate is not random and it is not about aircraft age. It is built from two things you control: staff morale and schedule pressure.
1. Crew morale
Punctuality is a team effort, and the three front-line groups matter in different amounts:
| Group | Share of on-time performance | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pilots | 50% | They fly the schedule and absorb en-route disruption. |
| Ground staff | 30% | They turn the aircraft around between flights. |
| Cabin crew | 20% | They board passengers and close the doors on time. |
The higher the blended morale of these groups, the higher your on-time rate. Even a happy, well-paid workforce won't hit a perfect 100% — some disruption is baked in — but strong morale is the single biggest lever you have. You manage all of this in Operations → Labor: pay, conditions and staffing levels all feed morale. A fleet run with mediocre morale (say, in the mid-50s) settles around a 20% delay rate; a well-run operation at default morale is closer to 9%, and a genuinely happy airline pushes on-time performance into the low-single-digit delay range.
2. Schedule pressure (fleet utilization)
The second lever is how hard you fly your aircraft. Each aircraft has a weekly flight-hour cap, and Tailwinds tracks how close your fleet runs to it on average. Below about 60% of the cap, your schedule has enough slack to absorb a late inbound flight without it cascading through the rest of the day — no penalty. Push the whole fleet toward 100% of the cap and there's no recovery time built in, so delays snowball. Flying flat-out can knock up to 12 percentage points off your on-time rate on its own.
Idle spare aircraft count as buffer, not waste. A couple of unassigned frames give your network room to recover when a flight slips — and they quietly protect your on-time rate.
Why delays cost you money
When flights are badly delayed or cancelled, real airlines owe passengers compensation under rules like the EU's EU261 and the US DOT framework. Tailwinds models the same thing, and it's the "delay & cancellation payouts" line you see in Finance. The calculation is straightforward:
- Start with your delay rate (1 − on-time rate).
- Only the worst delays and cancellations are compensable — roughly 1 in 10 of your delayed flights escalates that far. So at a 20% delay rate, about 2% of your passengers trigger a payout.
- Each of those passengers is owed an amount that scales with how far they were flying:
| Route distance | Compensation per affected passenger |
|---|---|
| Under 1,500 km (short-haul) | $275 |
| 1,500–3,500 km (medium-haul) | $440 |
| Over 3,500 km (long-haul) | $660 |
Put together, your weekly bill is roughly passengers carried × 2% × the per-passenger rate at a 20% delay rate. That's why a big carrier can see a very large number here: it isn't a penalty for being big, it's the sum of a small per-passenger cost across a lot of people. An airline flying tens of thousands of passengers a week at a 20% delay rate can easily run a six-figure weekly compensation bill.
The key insight: it scales with your delay rate
Because the payout is directly proportional to your delay rate, cutting delays cuts the bill by the same amount. Take an airline paying $270k a week at an 80% on-time rate. Lift on-time performance to 90% — halving the delay rate from 20% to 10% — and that line roughly halves to about $135k. Get punctual and the compensation problem largely solves itself. And remember it pays off twice: a higher on-time rate also lifts your quality score, so you carry more passengers and can price higher at the same time.
How to fix a high delay rate
- Raise crew morale first. In Operations → Labor, improve pay and conditions for pilots and ground staff especially — they carry 80% of the on-time weighting between them.
- Build in schedule slack. If your fleet is averaging well above 60% of its weekly hour cap, you're buying delays. Add a spare aircraft, or trim a few frequencies on routes where the metal is maxed out.
- Grow into capacity, not past it. When you add routes or frequencies, add the aircraft to fly them comfortably rather than stretching the existing fleet thinner.
- Watch the trend after changes. Morale moves over several weeks, so give a pay rise or a new spare aircraft a little time before judging the effect.
Further reading
On-time performance is one input to your overall demand and quality — the same page explains how punctuality, cabin product and reputation combine into the score passengers actually respond to. For the cost side of the ledger, the route economics guide shows how every operating line, compensation included, lands on a route's profit. And the fleet planning guide covers sizing a fleet with the slack that keeps you punctual.
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