Airlines are very good at producing numbers that flatter them.

Complaints to airline customer service get absorbed. A complaint filed through the Department of Transportation’s channel does not: under 14 CFR 259.7 the airline has 30 days to acknowledge it in writing and 60 days to send a substantive response. That obligation is the whole mechanism, and most passengers do not know it exists.

You pay a flat fee for the filing and keep whatever the airline pays. We take no percentage.

Because the filing only matters if someone is keeping score. The federal government publishes an enormous amount about airline performance, in flat files, in formats nobody reads, with the interesting comparisons left unmade. We pull it, compute it, and publish it with its uncertainty attached.

• Every number traces to a government dataset. Not to a press release, not to another blog, and not to an industry survey with an interest in the answer. Where we compute a figure ourselves, the arithmetic is published.
• The checks run before a human reads the draft. An automated check matches every number in an article against the source row it claims to come from. If a digit does not reconcile, the page cannot publish. It has caught real errors, including ones we made.
• We publish the caveats that weaken our own story. Every statistic carries its limitations and they survive into the article. That is the part most publishers cut for length, and it is the reason ours can be cited.
• We say what we do not know. Where a page is missing something, it says so instead of filling the gap with confident prose. Several pages on this site currently tell you exactly what is not finished.

The rules in full are on our editorial guidelines page, and how the desk operates is on the masthead.

Row30 takes no money from airlines. No advertising, no sponsored content, no affiliate arrangements with any carrier. We are funded by the flat filing fee and nothing else.

The conflict that does exist is worth naming rather than hiding: we make money when passengers file complaints, which gives us an incentive to make airline performance look worse than it is. The statistical rules we hold ourselves to exist to remove our discretion in exactly the places where that incentive would bite. Judge us on whether we follow them, and on what we do when we get something wrong.

Analysis produced in-house is published under an organizational byline, the Row30 Data Desk. That is a common convention for statistical reporting and it is the honest description of how these pieces are made: from a pipeline and a published ruleset rather than one reporter’s notebook. Where a named individual writes a piece, it carries their name.

Editorial responsibility rests with Row30’s founder and editor, reachable through our contact page. The masthead sets out what the desk is, how it works, and what it is not.

Not a law firm, not your lawyer, and not a service that can promise an airline will pay. The full statement of that matters more than most pages on this site, and it is worth two minutes.