Qantas Cops Least Reliable Airline for October

[kangarooflyer88]

Well, October’s BITRE report on domestic on time performance is out and Qantas took top spot (for delays and cancellations that is) for least reliable Australian airline, beating even their luxury arm, JétStar in the process:

Qantas now the 'least reliable' domestic airline in Australia

What would be interesting (albeit it’s not currently tracked to my knowledge) is how QF fared against rivals for internationals routes. Additionally, one must wonder too whether having an EU style compensation scheme might help improve OTP by imposing a cost on delays?

-RooFlyer88

 

[RooFlyer]

Already posted here. In detail, they discriminate between Qantas Group, Qantas mainline and QantasLink (also Virgin and Virgin regional network).

 

[kangarooflyer88]

Already posted here. In detail, they discriminate between Qantas Group, Qantas mainline and QantasLink (also Virgin and Virgin regional network).

That was posted in the Virgin forum although I’d argue it’s more relevant to Qantas as they were revealed to be the top unreliable carrier. Everyone else are impersonators (and bad ones at that). From the BITRE report what we see is that whilst JetStar and Virgin both had the highest cancellations overall, Qantas wasn't far behind. Interestingly enough QantasLink had better on time performance than mainline Qantas service:



What I would be curious about is why specifically mainline is having worse OTP than QantasLink? Could it be that most flights between major cities on the east coast (i.e. SYD > BNE > MEL triangle) are operated by Qantas mainline with Qantas being accused of slot hoarding (i.e. the practice of scheduling large numbers of flights everyday but cancelling a number of them to avoid having to operate them whilst keeping the slot they "took" from a rival airline)? If that is the case we would expect a similar pattern with Virgin Australia mainline versus its regional affiliate which we do indeed see. On the other hand, an argument could be made that SYD and MEL were experiencing severe weather on same days during that period (i.e. heavy winds) preventing safe take offs and landings.

What I would be interested in seeing in a BITRE report is the actual cause of delays/cancellations broken down by airline. How much of these cancellations were mechanical? How much were due to commercial reasons? How many were weather related? Certainly these statistics both for international and domestic flights would tell us how serious the problem is and whether legislation should be in place to protect travellers. Whilst some may argue that weather is outside the control of Qantas (I'm inclined not to believe that) I think many would argue that cancelling a flight for commercial reasons (i.e. slot hoarding) isn't fair, especially if you believe that the ticket you booked was more than just a bundle of rights.

-RooFlyer88

 

[milehighclub]

What I would be interested in seeing in a BITRE report is the actual cause of delays/cancellations broken down by airline.

I have commented before somewhere that the data is useless without the reasons behind it.

All airlines have systems in place for where there is a delay, the system asks for a please explain. There are hundreds of codes (IATA delay codes - Wikipedia). The systems are set up so that something or someone is held accountable - but these are not shared with BITRE, they are simply for internal. But a flight isn't just delayed for no reason.

Whilst you probably wouldn't need to get down to the nitty gritty, it would be easy to work out, on a very basic level, what delays were within the airlines control (short staffed, engineering etc) vs outside (weather, airport ops issue, ATC, medical etc).