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SA's largest airports achieve top spots for punctuality
The annual Punctuality League tables published by OAG has revealed that South Africa's three largest airports namely Cape Town International Airport, King Shaka International Airport and O. R. Tambo International Airport, have overcome considerable upheaval in the local aviation sector in 2019 to remain in the top tiers of global on-time performance with rankings of second, ninth and tenth in their respective categories.
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The OAG Punctuality League is based on 57.7-million flight records using full-year data from 2019 to create a ranking of the best on-time performance for the world’s largest airlines and airports.
Deon Cloete, acting group executive: airports management at Airports Company South Africa, says punctuality is a key indicator of operational efficiency.
"The importance of punctuality and efficiency extends well beyond being items on a business performance scorecard. They are the core components of passenger satisfaction and a critical focus for our airports. Ultimately, the on-time performance creates predictability which is an essential value-add for passengers," says Cloete.
With an on-time performance of 92.5%, Cape Town International Airport was second in the medium category for airports with five-million to 10-million departing passengers per year.
King Shaka International Airport came in at ninth position in the small airports' category for airports with 2.5-million to five-million departing passengers per year with an on-time performance of 83.59%.
In the category for large airports, defined as processing 10-million to 20-million departing passengers, O. R. Tambo International Airport reported on-time performance of 83.01% for tenth place out of all airports in that category.
Maintaining operational efficasy
Cloete says the challenges experienced by the local aviation sector over the past year highlighted the importance of collaboration and flexibility among the dozens of entities and thousands of employees working in an airport environment. "Typically, only around 10% of people working at an airport are directly employed by the owner of the airport, in this case, Airports Company South Africa. The bulk of people working at an airport work for airlines, ground handling companies, security contractors and dozens of airline suppliers," adds Cloete.
"Keeping an airport operating efficiently is therefore very complex, requires extremely tight collaboration and an ability to respond to events as they happen.
"We are pleased that as airport communities we have been able to maintain good levels of on-time performance and we appreciate the daily efforts of every person working at our airports," he says.
Cloete also highlighted the on-time performance of FlySafair, a significant customer of Airports Company South Africa, which produced an on-time performance of 94.4%. This was the top airline on-time performance in the Middle East and Africa. Globally, only Garuda Airlines of Indonesia scored higher (95.01%), although in a different size category.
"To score the second-highest on-time performance out of all airlines around the world is a wonderful achievement and we extend our heartiest congratulations to the FlySafair team," says Cloete.
