Behind the Byline
How I wrote an airport data story that earns coverage
On Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, ConsumerAffairs published a data story I wrote on the best and worst airports in the U.S. for flight disruptions.
Within two days, Yahoo, a Washington, D.C., TV station, and a Disney World fan site had written about it, and more outlets may follow.
Today, I’m sharing how that story came together.
The starting point
The ConsumerAffairs Research Team had analyzed 2 years of Department of Transportation flight data. They scored 122 airports on how severe their disruptions are, how often they happen, and how easily travelers can recover. It’s a lot of numbers, and my job was to find the story in them.
Airport rankings are everywhere online, and many focus on delays and nothing else.
This study asked a better question: What happens to you once something goes wrong?
That became my starting point.
Finding the angle
Reagan National had the highest cancellation rate in the study, at 2.8%. That was the obvious headline, but a more interesting pattern emerged when I read through all five of the worst airports. Each one struggled in its own way. DCA had cancellations, Newark had long delays, and Miami had diversions.
Since a cancellation and a long delay call for different next steps, I built the story around what each problem means for someone standing at the gate.
Then there was LAX. It’s an airport people love to complain about, and it ranked first among large airports. Atlanta, the world’s busiest, came in fifth best. Those two results gave me the thread for the whole piece. Size doesn’t decide how reliable an airport is.
Making it useful
Numbers only go so far, so I tapped my network to find travel insurance and consumer advocacy experts who could say what travelers should actually do when a flight falls apart.
Their advice gave the story a practical ending:
I also gave every airport the same set of stats in the same order so readers could compare them quickly.
Finally, I checked each figure against the research team’s data before it went to my editor, because people use rankings like this to decide how to book a flight — and one wrong number can send them the wrong way.
What came back
On Friday, Oct. 23, 2026, ConsumerAffairs’s PR team let me know that three pieces have come out:
- A Yahoo contributor who flies out of LAX wrote a first-person piece about her home airport: “Travelers love to hate my home airport. But a new study just ranked it No. 1 in America”
- A local T.V. station in Washington, D.C., looked at how DCA, Dulles, and BWI ranked: “DCA ranks as worst large U.S. airport for flight disruptions; Dulles also in top 10”
- Disney Dining, a fun Disney fan site, focused on families connecting through the worst airports on their way to Orlando: “Disney World Vacations at Risk: New Report Reveals Shocking Data on Airport Reliance”
The story gave each outlet something to work with, and that’s what I aim for with any data piece.
Have interesting data with no story yet?
Plenty of publications and firms have survey results or research sitting in a spreadsheet. If that’s you, I’d love to help turn it into something people want to read and share! I work from your data, develop or refine your proposed angle, bring in expert voices, and fact-check every number before it goes out.
Here’s what it looks like to work with me, from the ConsumerAffairs side:
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Want to see my approach to producing clear, thoroughly researched E-E-A-T content? Check out my portfolio of YMYL articles I’ve written for prominent publications, including USA TODAY and Insurify, as well as consumer-facing companies like The Alloy Market and OmniWatch.
For partnership inquiries, please email me at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn.