New figures show Qantas had the most cancelled flights of any domestic airline last month, with more than 10 services a day taken off the schedule in October.
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TVTranscript
00:00 This morning I can't see any cancellations on the boards and passengers are moving pretty
00:06 freely through with the flights on time generally so at least good news today.
00:11 However, this report that has been put out by the Federal Government's Department of
00:17 Infrastructure and Transport which is the on-time performance data for domestic airlines
00:23 shows that actually across the board for all airlines we've seen for the month of October
00:29 that on-time departures and arrivals being significantly down in October than the long-term
00:36 average.
00:37 So down to 71% of flights actually getting off the ground on time compared with 81% and
00:43 also cancellations are up as well.
00:45 Up 3.8% from 2.2% as well and if we look at actually Qantas' figures, well they at the
00:53 moment according to this report are rating the worst in terms of one in three flights
00:59 being behind schedule and more than 10 flights per day actually being cancelled.
01:06 So we're talking about a cancellation rate for Qantas of 4.3% that's higher than Jetstar
01:13 and Virgin that are both sitting at 4.1%.
01:17 If we take a look at the routes where you see most cancellations occur, will they actually
01:22 happen on the Sydney to Armidale flight which is up in the northern New South Wales table
01:28 lands and also Melbourne, Sydney at 10.2%.
01:33 So that's just one in 10 of those flights actually being cancelled and then Armidale
01:38 to Sydney route at 10% and also the Sydney to Melbourne route at 9.9%.
01:44 Qantas says that you should actually compare its figures with Qantas Link as well which
01:50 has a much better and lower cancellation rate down at 3.6% because they do so many of the
01:56 sectors around the areas of Australia like Sydney to Canberra for example.
02:02 And also it says that we saw only six days in the month of October that didn't actually
02:09 have flights impacted by bad weather, by thunderstorms and strong winds and the like.
02:15 We also had 42 flights of Qantas actually being cancelled due to lightning strikes on
02:21 the aircraft and they also say that they had a difficult time over in WA with dozens of
02:27 flights cancelled due to one of the pilot strikes over there.
02:31 However it does say that customer on-time performance is its priority and it's going
02:36 to make sure that as it looks ahead to the all-important Christmas period that it is
02:41 going to have contingency plans in place and also work on some resilience in its schedule
02:47 and also flight crews on standby to be able to accommodate the load.
02:51 [BLANK_AUDIO]