The complaint rankings is a little misleading because it fails to indicate what is taken into effect. Yes, in the Department of Transportation's June Consumer Report, Airtran ranked 10th among the 19 carriers reported. The complaint numbers are for April 2008, not the entire year to date and the carriers rank is based on the number of complaints per 100,000 enplanements.
During April, the DOT recieve 19 complaints against Airtran with a total enplanement figure of 1,986,989 for a raio of .96 complaints per 100,000 passengers. (United was worst with 2.55 and Southwest the best at .35)
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In
July's report, Airtran fell to 17th (out of 19) with a ratio of 1.32.
Those numbers are not good (and indicate an drastic increase from the same time periods last year). As far as calling them small, they are one of the largest carriers in the US (based on total number of passengers)