Oman Air, the official carrier of the Sultanate, has been named as the Middle East and Africa (MEA) leader for airline on-time performance for 2022 by Cirium, the global aviation analytics leader.
Oman Air’s top ranking performance in the MEA was followed by Royal Jordanian (2nd place ), Kuwait Airways (3), Emirates (4), Qatar Airways (5), Ethiopian Airlines (6), Middle East Airlines (7) Royal Air Maroc (8), EL AL (9) and Saudia (10), according to the Cirium 2022 On-Time Performance Review.
The past year saw a challenging operational environment across the world, particularly in Europe and North America, with many airlines and airports experiencing delays, disruptions and resource challenges, while others continued to emerge from Covid restrictions, especially in the Asia Pacific region. Despite this climate, many airlines and airports worldwide excelled.
For the second consecutive year Delta Airlines was honoured with the Cirium Platinum Award for global operational excellence. This award considers a number of factors including on-time performance, operational complexity and an airline’s ability to limit the impact of flight disruption to its passengers.
Alongside Delta’s Cirium Platinum Award, Azul Brazilian Airlines was the leader for on-time performance worldwide with the winners in the other global regions being Delta Air Lines in North America, Iberia for Europe, Azul for Latin America and Thai AirAsia in Asia Pacific.
StarFlyer was the leading low cost carrier and Haneda was the top airport performer globally.
An on-time flight is defined as a flight that arrives within 15 minutes of the scheduled gate arrival. For an airport it is defined as departing within 15 minutes of its scheduled departure.
Jeremy Bowen, Cirium CEO, said: “Ramping back up operations so quickly after an enforced slowdown is not easy to do and the top-ranked airlines in Cirium’s 2022 On-Time Performance Review deserve their recognition for this well-orchestrated achievement.
“Congratulations to Delta Air Lines for its excellent performance in Cirium’s 2022 On-Time Performance Review, as well as Oman Air for its success in the Middle East and Africa region, getting its passengers to their destinations on time as the sector revived during 2022.”
During 2022 airlines had difficulty anticipating the sudden recovery in demand. They had been disappointed on several previous occasions throughout the pandemic, when it looked like demand was picking up, only for it to reverse course in the face of new Covid variants.
When the recovery finally came this past year, the industry – including airlines, airports, air navigation providers and other stakeholders – struggled with understaffing and insufficient capacity. Delays and cancellations became an issue.
In time, however, operations greatly improved as the industry added workers and adjusted capacity. 2023 appears to hold great promise for the aviation industry.
Cirium looks forward to continuing to lead the way in monitoring aviation on-time performance in the New Year, as the industry adjusts to new post-pandemic norms.
The company’s data is designed to provide industry stakeholders with an independent, third-party perspective, based on the widest and deepest pool of data collected and curated from more than 600 sources of real-time flight information.
These include the airlines themselves, airports, global distribution systems, positional data, civil aviation authorities, air navigation service providers, proprietary data partnerships and the internet.
Cirium’s on-time performance data, furthermore, is backed by a completely independent board of advisors, comprised of industry experts with an unbiased view of the aviation sector. The board’s oversight ensures accuracy and proper representation of all the information the company presents.
The Cirium 2022 On-Time Performance Review is the global gold standard for airline and airport performance and it will be published later this week, containing results for all airline categories, more detail and analysis.
Source: Civil Aviation Authority-Qatar