Carriers serving Salt Lake City generally improved their performances.

The nation's 20 largest carriers reported an on-time arrival rate of 81.7 percent in September, up from 76.2 percent in the same month a year ago and up from 71.7 percent in August, the Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics said.

Better weather was partly to credit for the improved results. More than 34 percent of late flights in September were delayed by weather, an improvement from a year ago when more than 40 percent of those flights experienced weather-related delays.

Despite the improved September results, more than 24 percent of flights arrived late in the first nine months of the year. The industry's on-time performance this year remained the worst since comparable data began being collected in 1995.

Delta Air Lines, the dominant carrier at Salt Lake City International Airport, landed 82 percent its flights on time. That's up from 68.6 percent a year ago, when the airline was still in bankruptcy, and 69.6 percent in August.

SkyWest Airlines, which flies commuter planes for Delta, United Airlines and Midwest Airlines, had an on-time rate of 82.9 percent in September. A year earlier, 78 percent of its planes arrived on schedule. In August, SkyWest's arrival rate was 75.6 percent.

SkyWest's sister carrier, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, had the lowest on-time performance in September, at 63.4 percent. Still, that was better than a year ago, when just 55.5 percent of ASA's plans arrived on schedule. The carrier's August performance was 55 percent.

The statistics come amid increased concern about flight delays. Last month, federal aviation regulators conducted a two-day summit aimed at fixing ''epidemic'' delays at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport , which had the second-worst on-time arrival record of any major U.S. airport through September, followed by Newark's Liberty International Airport.

The Salt Lake airport's arrival rate was 84.9 percent, down slightly from 85.2 percent a year ago but up from 80 percent in August.

The latest government proposal to alleviate delays is to reduce JFK's hourly flight limit by 20 percent. But the airline industry's trade group, the Air Transport Association, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs JFK, both prefer flight-path changes and improvements aimed at increasing the airport's capacity.

Not all airlines suffered through poor performance in September.

Aloha Airlines had the highest on-time arrival rate at 95.4 percent, followed by Hawaiian Holdings Inc.'s Hawaiian Airlines at 93.7 percent and Frontier Airlines at 88.5 percent, according to government data.

Customer complaints rose in September to 895, compared with 627 in the same month last year, according to the government data. But the rates of mishandled baggage fell to about 5.5 reports per 1,000 passengers from 8.3 reports a year ago.