Statistically, United's performance has been absolutely abysmal. The crap really started hitting the fan in June of last year, when United reported departure/arrival on-time numbers of 42% and 66% (in other words, over half of flights departed late, and over one-third arrived late, meaning they didn't make up much time in the air).
For another perspective: if we look at "chronically delayed" flights (DOT defines this as being 30+ minutes delayed, 50% or more of the time), the most recent month published (November 2015) shows one-third of the chronically-delayed flights in the US are on United's network, through its chronically-comically-delayed Newark hub. Back in 2013 the WSJ published a report listing eleven flights through Newark which had landed on the chronically-delayed list for 8 consecutive months or more. The only carrier with more chronically-delayed flights than United... is Spirit. And that's saying something (they're also typically the only airline with worse overall on-time performance than United).
Granted, a lot of that is from affiliates running small regional jets under the "United Express" brand -- though mainline United was still dead last in on-time performance among the big three legacy US carriers in Q3 2015 -- but in turn that's mostly ripple effects of the way United manages its regionals and shops out as much flying as possible to them (in Q3 2015, Delta operated 233,000 flights, American operated 234,000 and United only 133,000; over the same time period ExpressJet, which does regional operations for all three but primarily for United, operated over 142,000 flights, and SkyWest which has over half its flying as United Express operated over 152,000 flights), which in turn was thanks to a major strategy (slashing mainline operations in the name of "capacity discipline") of the previous Smisek-led management at United.
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