Qantas has been announced as the most punctual airline of 2016 across the Asia Pacific region, following the release of OAG’s annual Punctuality League.
Jumping from fourth place to first in just one year, the carrier, which operated approximately 268,000 flights throughout 2016, marginally beat Japan Airlines to the top spot, with 87.6 per cent of its flights arriving on time.
However, Qantas’s performance wasn’t just limited to the Asia Pacific League, with the airline also placing fourth in the global top 20 mainline category, just 2.3 per cent behind number one global mainline carrier, Hawaiian Airlines, and 1.2 per cent behind COPA Airlines and 0.3 per cent behind KLM.
Australian airports are well represented across all the categories: Cairns (CNS) joins the global top 10 in the Small Airports Category (2.5m-5m departing seats) and tops the rankings for Australian and New Zealand airports for handling flights on time in 2016 with 87.23 per cent of flights categorised as on-time. They were closely followed by Brisbane (BNE), down the coast from Cairns, which managed OTP of 86.71 per cent.
This impressive performance at Cairns comes at a time when the airport is the fastest growing amongst Australia’s big airports. Cairns handled 7.8 per cent more flights in 2016 than the previous year, with international flights growing at almost double the rate of domestic growth. International growth is strongest to Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines.
Australia’s Gold Coast airport (OOL) also makes it into the rankings this year, and is keeping pace with growth at Cairns. Handling 7.3 per cent more flights in 2016 than the previous year, Gold Coast has seen international flights rocket by 20 per cent year on year, mostly on routes to Malaysia and China.
Sydney (SYD) continues to belong to the Top 20 most punctual airports in the world (Major Category – >20m departing seats) whilst Melbourne misses out this year by 0.1 per cent. Perth and Adelaide achieved Top 10 status in their category (Medium) whilst Brisbane also made the Top 10 in the Large category.
Whilst Australia’s domestic market is not in expansion mode, and flights at Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide have seen little if any domestic growth, the same cannot be said of international flights. Average growth of 8.7 per cent in flights took place across Australia’s biggest airports in 2016, so we are encouraged to see OTP performance maintained, and so many of Australia’s airports in our punctuality league.
View the full results from the OAG Punctuality League 2016 and download a copy of the full report.
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OAG has the world’s largest network of air travel data including the definitive schedules database of more than 900 airlines and over 4,000 airports. With the most extensive flight status information database in the market, OAG handles approximately 54 million records of flight status updates per year, processes 1.4 billion requests and continues to deliver in excess of 35 million dynamic flight status updates daily. For more information, visit: www.oag.com and follow us on Twitter @OAG Aviation.
