By Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist, Blogging at The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

If you have a choice of which airport you should fly in or out of, what ones should you select?

In the article “America’s Best and Worse Airports 2008,” on Travel + Leisure, airports throughout the country are rated according to the percentage of flights delayed.

About 23 percent of domestic flights arrived at least 15 minutes late from January through August of 2008; that’s only slightly better than 2007′s worst-ever on-time performance of 24 percent of flights delayed, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Travel + Leisure gathered figures from FlightStats for airlines with 20 or more weekly flights out of major domestic airports from October 1, 2007, through September 30, 2008.

The figures below indicate the percentage of all flights that departed more than 15 minutes behind schedule from January 1, 2008, to August 31, 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Best airports

• Salt Lake City – 14 percent

• Portland, Ore. – 16 percent

• San Diego – 19 percent

• Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis/St. Paul – 19 percent

• Seattle, Phoenix, and Tampa – 20 percent

• LAX – 21 percent

Worse airports

• Chicago Midway and Atlanta – 25 percent

• New York John F. Kennedy and San Francisco – 26 percent

• Washington Dulles – 27 percent

• New York LaGuardia — 28 percent

• Dallas Ft. Worth – 30 percent

• Miami – 31 percent

• Newark – 33 percent

• Chicago O’Hare – 35 percent

See the article for details on which airports improved and worsened over the last year.

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