In a prompt reply to Air India, FlightStats clarified that Bloomberg's report wrongly showed Air India as the 3rd worst in "On Time Performance", whilst citing FlightStats data as its source. The reply came hours after Air India, wrote to the Portland, OR based Aviation Insights company, saying that the data presented in the report leads one to "speculate" of the "intentions" behind the entire exercise.
"Air India strongly contest the data shared and veracity of the report... Air India will take a strong action and leave no stone unturned to ascertain and bring to light any biased or malicious intent to spoil Air India's image," the airline said in the letter.
The Bloomberg report that attempted to rank airlines based on Punctuality quickly went viral. The report had stated;
"Every year, the aviation insights company FlightStats puts together a list of the international airlines with the best on-time performance records. It's the capstone to the company's year-round efforts to track delay and cancellation patterns for airlines across the globe. We've asked them to share all of their annual findings so we can point out the losers, too. Without further ado, here are the full results, along with your likelihood of getting delayed on each carrier:"
It its reply to AI, FlightStats clarified;
"Our Data, which was a measure of 97.7% of your arriving flights, indicated that 61.29% of AI's flights arrived within the A14 threshold. Bloomberg applied its journalistic license to invert the A14 (formula) result to highlight the percentage of delayed flights being 38.17% and indicated that the number was a predictor to future delays. This is not how we would portray airline OTP; nor were we given access to the Bloomberg article prior to it's publication."
