IndiGo and AirAsia made it to the list of top 20 punctual airlines in 2018 across ‘mega carriers’ and ‘LCC category’. The list, prepared by a UK-based air consultancy company OAG, analysed 5.8 crores 2018 flights records from across the world to make the rankings of the best on-time performance (OTP) of world’s big airlines and airports. According to the list, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi are the airports that had on-time flights in 2018. The report considered the flights that arrive/depart within 15 minutes of their scheduled time to make OTP ranking.
The list, dubbed as ‘Punctuality League 2019’, has the Latin-American airline Copa on top. Copa won the rankings across all categories. Indian airlines IndiGo won sixth place in the category of ‘mega carriers’ and seventh place in ‘LCC category’. In the category of ‘Asian Pacific’ airlines, IndiGo is at the 10th place. In ‘LCC category’, AirAsia India is 12th in the ranking.
Airport Rankings
Airports are categorised by the number of flyers annually.
In the category of mega airports, Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is at the 13th position with 76.03 percentage flights operating on-time. This is similar to the New York’s JFK hub. Mega airports are the airports that witness more than 3 crore flyers every year.
In the category of large airports, Hyderabad is ranked at 13th position with 80.27 percentage of flights operating on-time. Bengaluru airport is listed at 16th rankings with 79.6 percentage of flights on-time. Large airports are the ones that handle around 1-2 crores passengers every year.
In the small airport category that handles 25-50 lakhs airports annually, Bhubaneswar is positioned at 20th ranking with 81.64 percentage flights reported on-time.
According to experts in the field, Indian airlines could have got better rankings in OTP report. They blame the lack of infrastructure to deal with the increasing traffic for the lower rankings. In places where the airports that reportedly suffer from huge traffic, such as Mumbai and Pune, the government could focus on giving new airports, or adding more terminals and runaways. Here when one flight gets delayed, all the sectors the flight has to do that day are consequentially delayed.
