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✈︎ Spheres newsletter: Week 1, 2026

January 4, 2026

Nate Silver’s 10-minute rule for lounges

Nate Silver:

With certain rare exceptions max you should wait for an airline lounge is probably 10 minutes, lotta sunk cost fallacy on display, and conditional on there being a wait it’s often more crowded and less pleasant inside than in increasingly nice public airport spaces.

Silver was replying to yet another photo showing a long line outside a Delta club. Go to any of their hubs and you’ll see the same soon enough.

I think they blew this aspect of the American Express deal. Even after limiting visits for most cardholders, there’s clearly still too many people with too much access. The Centurion lounges are also overcrowded.

You can make the lounges bigger, but how much bigger, in how many places, and how many years later?

Credit to American where it’s due: they have the right access policies in place. Charlotte aside, you rarely see lounges this crowded.

CEOs, they’re just like us

The Wall Street Journal asked CEOs how they deal with jet lag. Lots of answers you’d expect:

  • Go to sleep on your destination’s clock
  • Use hand sanitizer to avoid getting sick
  • Drink water, not alcohol

And a few you wouldn’t:

  • Don’t eat on board (United CEO Scott Kirby’s advice!)
  • Skip the melatonin and take a late flight instead
  • Turn off your devices before takeoff
  • Change socks when you land
  • Work out at the hotel

January 3, 2026

SkyTeam had the best on-time performance among top airlines in 2025

Delta was the MVP in Cirium’s on-time performance rankings released yesterday. Here are the top 10 on-time airlines:

  • Aeromexico – 90%
  • Saudia – 87%
  • SAS – 86%
  • Azul – 85%
  • Qatar – 84%
  • Iberia – 84%
  • LATAM – 82%
  • Avianca – 82%
  • Turkish – 81%
  • Delta – 81%

What makes Delta impressive is the volume: the airline ran 1.8 million flights and still made it into the top 10. The other nine airlines averaged roughly 300k flights each.

The report lists the top 10 on-time airlines by region and their total completed flights, making it possible to calculate the on-time performance of each alliance among top airlines:

  • SkyTeam – 82% of 2.7m flights
  • Star Alliance – 79% of 3.7m flights
  • No alliance – 79% of 5.5m flights
  • oneworld – 78% of 4.0m flights

The major factor, as always, is the US airlines, where American was the biggest player but also the slowest. On-time performance among major US airlines:

  • Delta – 81% of 1.8m flights
  • United – 79% of 1.7m flights
  • American – 76% of 2.2m flights

(Alaska was on-time for 79% of their 453k flights, and credit to Spirit, which had the same on-time performance for their 218k flights.)

January 1, 2026

oneworld in 2026

Here are the routes, planes, services, and other changes that caught my eye for 2026.

oneworld

Alaska

American

British

Cathay

Fiji

Finnair

Iberia

JAL

Malaysia

Oman

  • New routes from Muscat to Singapore, Copenhagen (via Baghdad), and Taif
  • Retiring the B737-800 and 900-ER

Qantas

  • New routes between the Gold Coast to Auckland; Sydney to Samoa (via Auckland), and Port Moresby
  • New lounges: refurbished Business lounge in Los Angeles,4 new lounge in Hobart, and refurbished regional lounges
  • Free wifi on international routes flown by the A330, B787, and A380
  • Project Sunrise test flights

Qatar

Royal Air Maroc

Royal Jordanian

SriLankan

  1. If there is a new member airline from India, it will be IndiGo. The only other major airline, Air India, is a Star Alliance member. IndiGo partnered with four SkyTeam members in June, but it also has ties with American, British, JAL, Qantas, and Qatar. ↩︎
  2. Alaska and American are following the same playbook for wifi: it’s free because a cellular network is sponsoring it, and you’ll only get it if you’re a member of the airline’s loyalty program. I hope they’ll spare members of each other’s programs or non-US oneworld airlines from having to sign up for an account that will never get used. ↩︎
  3. Ditto. ↩︎
  4. The concept photo suggests that the iconic Eames Lounge Chairs aren’t coming along for the ride. ↩︎

December 31, 2025

American has the lowest drinking water quality, maybe

A new report circulating on travel sites and Reddit has bad news for American fliers:

The 2026 Airline Water Study ranks 10 major and 11 regional airlines by the quality of water they provided onboard flights during a three-year study period (October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2025). Each airline was given a “Water Safety Score” (5.00 = highest rating, 0.00 = lowest) based on five weighted criteria, including violations per aircraft, Maximum Contaminant Level violations for E. coli, indicator-positive rates, public notices, and disinfecting and flushing frequency. A score of 3.5 or better indicates that the airline has relatively safe, clean water and earns a Grade A or B.

“Delta Air Lines and Frontier Airlines win the top spots with the safest water in the sky, and Alaska Airlines finishes No. 3,” says Charles Platkin, PhD, JD, MPH, director of the Center for Food as Medicine and Longevity.

The airlines with the worst score are American Airlines and JetBlue, the study shows. “Nearly all regional airlines need to improve their onboard water safety, with the exception of GoJet Airlines,” Platkin says.

The study is based on records submitted to the EPA by the airlines under the Aircraft Drinking Water Rule, as outlined by the author in a lengthy methodology statement.

Still, we don’t know much about the non-profit behind the study. I couldn’t find references to it in any major news publication; the only report it publishes that seems to get any traction is this annual study. It has some legitimate advisors, but its website also has photo after photo of unlabeled AI slop.

Even putting this study aside, travelers regularly wonder where the drinking water and ice comes from on airplanes.

Seems like the perfect place for American’s new Customer Experience unit to go to work. Reassure customers that drinking water comes from a safe source instead of letting reports like these do the work for them. If there is a problem, it’s relatively cheap to solve. There are new champagne and coffee partnerships. Why not the most ubiquitous drink on board as well?

December 30, 2025

Monocle: How New York airports are making US air travel great again

Henry Rees-Sheridan:

At $8bn (€7bn), LaGuardia’s redevelopment was one of the most expensive airport projects in US history. But it is dwarfed in cost and scale by the ongoing redevelopment of JFK, which is focused on two largely independent terminal refurbishments. A new Terminal 1 will cater exclusively to international passengers, while a redeveloped Terminal 6 will serve domestic and international routes.

…For Barry Yanku of architecture firm Corgan, the project’s lead designer, the challenge is to create a sense of civic grandeur, as Saarinen managed, while meeting the technical requirements of a modern terminal. “This is our front door here in New York,” he says. There is hope that if the JFK project is successful, it will prove the effectiveness of public-private partnerships as a way of funding airports and provide inspiration for other long-maligned American hubs. 

LGA is still hamstrung by poor ground connectivity, but deserves every award it’s been given. Meanwhile, the new JFK terminals look fantastic. One caveat: Cathay and Qatar travelers with a domestic connection will soon have to change terminals, since those airlines are moving out of T8, while American and the newly-moved-in Alaska are staying put.

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