AUSTRALIAN AIRLINES: Minister slams Virgin Australia and Qantas for worst on time performance in a year

In the past few months it has been the Minister being smashed by the Opposition, Airlines and the media for her dithering and poorly explained decision to refuse additional landing rights for Qatar Airways.

Looks like she is hitting back. For the first time, Catherine King, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, has hit back directly to the airlines regarding delays and cancellations.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Research Economics has just released November’s data report on on-time performance of Airlines and its not good.

November on-time performance of Airlines in Australia

Qantas and Virgin Australia operate about 90% of domestic flights. Only 64% of their combined flights arrived on time. That’s compared to the long term average of 81%. Cancellations at 3.7% for the month were approaching double the long-term average of 2.2%

Virgin has been a shocker. Almost half of Virgin Australia’s flights departed or arrived late in the month of November, and 6.3 % were cancelled.

Cancellations

Everyone experiences a flight departure or arrival display, and most of us, although mildly inconvenienced, are forgiving. Cancellations are a completely different kettle of fish. A cancelled flight is likely to engender actual anger from customers.

Virgin Australia

The worst offender, Virgin, had a cancellation rate of 6.3% in November. Virgin puts it down to crew resourcing and aircraft maintenance. This is like saying the thing that caused our cancellations was the core of what we do. Outside issues, like the lack of air traffic controllers, were out of their control.

Virgin is talking about using its own baggage handlers again for short-haul international flights, which is interesting, given that Qantas has been found guilty of illegally sacking some of its ground crew.

Qantas/Jetstar

Qantas and QantasLink managed to have half as many cancellations as Qantas, and its on-time performance over the last 15 months has been better than Virgin.

Jetstar earned a star in November with the best on-time performance at 68%. Its cancellation rate was at a more respectable 2.7%, too.

Bonza and Regional Express [REX]

At less than 5% of the domestic market, Bonza and REX performed the best with over 70% on-time performance. Unfortunately, they blotted their copybook with the second-highest cancellation rate of 4.2%

Why the bad performance

This is a symptom of post-pandemic traveller demand and poor airline planning. Close to 10% of Sydney/Melbourne flights were cancelled during November. As the second most popular route in the world, it has traditionally suffered from high cancellation rates. The accusation is that the big two, Qantas and Virgin, schedule a bunch of flights to make sure they hold the landing spots and then rotate the cancellations so that they can be seen to use the allocated slots still 80% of the time, which is specified in their contracts to retain the slots. The Airlines deny this is the case.

Their argument – particularly championed by Qantas is they cancel the flights on these routes over the routes because they can re-accommodate passengers most easily on these flights. Hence, it lowers disruptive events on other routes. That is probably true, but it also means they over allocate capacity on these routes, which has the inadvertent result of them retaining more slots, that they don;t use all the time. Chicken V egg?

Let’s add to the appearance of bias with a slot allocation organisation that is majority-owned by Qantas and Virgin Australia. Hmmmm.

2PAXfly Takeout

Same as it ever was, perhaps. Despite promises from all airlines to do better on the on-time performance and cancellation front, most are not. Jetstar, the previous worst performer, has done better, but Qantas and Virgin have not. Well, not by much, if at all. Virgin’s performance has definitely worsened.

To put it plainly: this kind of behaviour by airlines really gives passengers the shits. Do better airlines.