Deirdre Fulton & Becca Rowland

Our report this month reveals that across Western Europe and Eastern Europe, on-time performance (OTP) at airports was significantly improved on the levels achieved in March 2013. Numerous airports reported higher OTP, possibly attributable to the milder winter.

Sweden is of particular interest in that airports have managed to raise OTP at a time when the number of flights has also increased substantially. Further analysis indicates that SAS, Norwegian and Malmo Aviation have all been adding significant capacity. Low cost carrier Norwegian has lead the way with a massive 37% increase in flights in Sweden in March 2014 compared to the previous March. SAS Scandinavian Airlines has clearly followed with 12% more flights and smaller Malmo Aviation has increase flights by 29%. Despite handling 10% or more flights, airports such as Stockholm Arlanda, Goteborg Landvetter and Malmo have all improved on-time performance, possibly attributable to the higher proportion of low cost operations which are notoriously time-sensitive. On-time performance at these three airports was 88.6%, 92.0% and 94.8% respectively.

China is another interesting region. Having seen poor OTP at Chinese airports, this trend seems to be reversing and March was another good month for the top Chinese airports. At Beijing Capital International Airport OTP improved to 77.3% from 59.5% in March 2013. The improvement at Shanghai Pudong International Airport was not as large but the airport still achieved OTP of 66.1% this year. Guangzhou achieved a similar OTP at 66.7%, impressively up from 45.2% in March 2013, and taking it closer to the generally higher OTP at Hong Kong International Airport which was 71.8% in March.

Elsewhere, the Caribbean and Central America saw OTP decline in general in March, while Australia experienced the opposite. All the main Australian airports turned in good performances in March. OTP at Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport was 82.7%, up from 76.2% the previous March; Melbourne Airport achieved 84.3%, up from 80.8%; Brisbane increased OTP from 78.7% to 83.0% and Perth managed an impressive 91.0%, up from 81.6%.

Our monthly on-time performance review uses OAG's Flight Status data

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