(Airline Quality Rating: Washington, D.C.) -- Hawaiian Airlines has taken the top spot in the 17th annual national Airline Quality Ratin study. This is the first year that Hawaiian Airlines has been included. Jet Blue, which had been ranked first for the past three years, slipped to second.
The study ranking the largest U.S. airlines was recently announced at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Following Hawaiian and Jet Blue in the top five of the AQR were AirTran, Frontier and Northwest.

The AQR is a summary of month-by-month quality ratings for the largest domestic U.S. airlines operating during 2006. Co-researchers Brent Bowen, director and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Aviation Institute/School of Public Administration, and Dean Headley, associate professor of marketing at Wichita State University, used 15 elements important to consumers when judging the quality of airline service.

Hawaiian Airlines led in the category of best on-time performance. The company’s planes were on time 93.8 percent of the time. The airline also had the best baggage-handling rate (3.14 mishandled bags per 1,000 passengers) in the rankings.

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