South Africa’s Safair has won top honours for punctuality in a new survey of global on time performance that saw the wooden spoon awarded to a Canadian carrier whose flights arrived late more than half the time.
The latest comparison by scheduling experts OAG found that just under 95 per cent of Safair’s flights were on time in the 12 months to September, putting it well ahead of Spain’s Binter Canarias (91.1 per cent) and Germany’s TUIfly (90.4 per cent).
The airlines were among 14 to be given 5-star status in the latest ratings based on the percentage of arrivals that are within 15 minutes of the scheduled time over a 12-month rolling performance.
On-time performance (OTP) is particularly important to business travellers, who often travel to a tight schedule, and is closely watched on domestic services.
Many airlines have made big efforts in recent years to reduce the number of delays within their control. Punctuality can also be affected by events outside an airline’s control, such as airport congestion and bad weather, but the survey did not identify airlines affected in this manner.
Iberia was the biggest airline to achieve a 5-star rating with an on-time performance of 87.3 per cent over more than 200,000 flight operations.
Three Latin American carriers — Panama’s COPA (86.8 per cent) LATAM Airlines Ecudor (87.8 per cent) and Chile’s Sky Airline (87.6 per cent) — made the top group as did North America’s Hawaiian Airlines (87.7 per cent).
Singapore-based Jetstar Asia was the only Asia-pacific carrier to get five stars with 86.4 per cent of its flights arriving on time, relegating part owner Qantas (86.2 per cent) to the top of the 4-star list.
Other Asia-pacific carriers to achieve four tars included Singapore Airlines All Nippon Airways , Japan Airlines Air New Zealand, Virgin Australia’s international arm and Hong Kong Airlines
In the US, Delta Air Lines was awarded four stars, while Scandinavia’s SAS, Spain’s Vueling and Dutch carrier KLM were among the European carriers in that category.
Asian carriers dominated the 1-star category at the other end of the scale. These were airlines with more than a third of their flights running late and almost half in several cases.
Carriers in this category included China Eastern, Xiamen, Air China, Indonesia AirAsia, Indonesia AirAsia X, Shenzhen, Air India and Cebu Pacific.
The table’s worst performer was Canada’s Air Inuit, which has just 46.3 per cent of flights arriving on time.
