Asia-Pacific airlines star in punctuality rankings

Asia-Pacific airlines shine when it comes to getting passengers to their destination on time, taking out eight of the 13 top spots in the annual on-time performance review by aviation data experts OAG. Dark horse Garuda Indonesia was first past the post and earned a five-star rating with 91.6 percent of its flights on time. It was followed in the top five by Japan’s Fuji Dream Airlines (90.5 percent), Panama’s Copa Airlines (90.1 percent) and Japanese carriers Star Flyer (90.0 percent) and Skymark Airlines (89.2 percent). Air Baltic struck the first five-star blow for Europe with an OTP of 88.3 percent and was followed by the only US five-star airline, Hawaiian Airlines,  at 87.8 percent. READ: Human's retain upper hand when it comes to airport machines. Also in the five-star field were Japan’s AirDo, Thailand’s Bangkok Airways, Spain’s Binter Canarias, Tapei’s Uni Airways, Japan’s All Nippon Airways and Russia’s Aeroflot. Singaporean-based Jetstar Asia (84.6 percent) led the four-star category, which also included low-cost carriers Thai AirAsia (83.8 percent) Japan’s  Solaseed (83.7 percent)  and Indian carrier Indigo (81.5 percent). Other Asia-Pacific airlines in this category included Jetstar parent Qantas (84.3 percent), Japan Airlines (84.3 percent), Singapore Airlines (83.2 percent) and Fiji Airways (82.1 percent). Air New Zealand (78.7 percent), Malaysia Airlines (77.5) and Virgin Australia (77 percent) were among the region’s airlines in the three-star category There was a difference of almost 35 percentage points between the best performing carrier in the league and 56 percent on-time performance of it’s worst, Cebu Pacific. Joining Cebu in the bottom ranks were Czech Airlines (59.4 percent) and  Canada’s Sunwing Airlines (57.8 percent ). Twenty-nine of the 50 global airports to achieve five stars in the league were in the Asia Pacific, with 22 located in Japan. The top five airports were Hilo in the US (94.56 percent), Minsk International in Belarus (92.97), Japan’s Nagoya Komaki (91.9 percent) Panama City Tocumen International (91.07) and Hanamaki  (91.0), also in Japan. The analysis is based on a rolling 12-month performance and covers airlines and airports with a minimum of 600 operations a month where OAG processes flight status information for at least 80 percent of flights. It was measured between June 2018 and May 2019.