Three Myths About Airport Punctuality

While Ryanair is boasting to be the most punctual European airline, Oman Air celebrates one day of 100% on-time performance on April 26 this year. Unfortunately there is no public data that proves any of these claims.

What about airports? In April 2011 London Heathrow published a record 94% departure punctuality.  Now they are Britain's worst airport according to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

I think it's time to wade through some of the myths and confusion surrounding airport punctuality.

1. Punctuality is an internationally standardized metric.

Punctuality targets are usually defined in terms of 15-minute punctuality, i.e. a flight is counted as departing on-time if the plane goes off-blocks within 15 minutes of the scheduled time of  departure. But what is "15 minutes"? Is it more than 14'59" or more than 15' or even more than 15'59"? Now some airports and airlines may disagree on this but even ACI, IATA and AEA don't. If they do, then it will probably be 15'59", stealing another minute from the passenger, airline and airport capacity just to look better.

And, have you compared off-blocks times of airport and airline? Some airports check and validate differences within +/- 1 minute, most don't. Result: airport and airline report different punctuality figures.

2. Punctuality is a great metric to benchmark.

In previous posts I was highlighting some flaws of punctuality as a metric.

• Cancellations of delayed flights improve punctuality
• Indicator ignores size of aircraft and number of passengers affected
• No assessment about the financial loss possible
• Mix of performance which can be influenced with exogenous factors
• Difficult to determine improvement measures

Why is it still used, even as internal target? Because it is easy to understand and when it is bad, it can be easily attributed to exogenous factors.

3. Eurocontrol A-CDM improves airport punctuality.

There is no evidence that ECTRL A-CDM improves punctuality. Yes, it might reduce taxi times but with a negative effect on departure punctuality. With the lack of evidence I did some research myself and present the findings in my next post.

I know it is easy to lament. What do I have to offer instead? An approach and metrics to actually address the issue together with other stakeholders. Because the airport can have that 360° view and not just the silo view by every other stakeholder.

The 7 habits of highly effective punctuality management

As soon as an airport or an airline has a punctuality record month, they publish press releases, they celebrate. But how sustainable is such a short-time success? If you check their performance from then on, you may find them falling back to the levels before.

Can on-time performance be actively managed? If you think it can't be managed or can only be resolved by others, the following 7 habits may present a different perspective. If you already manage punctuality, you can assess where you are in your quest.

Habit	Characteristics
Accountability	There is a sufficient number of delay codes to differentiate delay causer Each delay code (with sub-code) has an owner or responsible organization The delay code assignment process is clear and in place (assign, accept, reject, handling of disputes, final call). Secondary delays are allocated to the original causer Delay cost is calculated and assigned to the causer
Transparency	Delay code assignment and on-time performance of every organization is transparent to everybody. Data quality is high Share performance with other airports
Standardization	Only one definition of delay codes and delays across the airport based on IATA standard, incorporated in the Airport Handling Manual (AHM) Any non-conformance e.g. different reporting from an airline to its head office will be brought forward to the Governance Forum
Governance and Benchmarking	Multi-stakeholder Airport Operations Control Center to manage the daily operational on-time performance and escalations Has a Punctuality Manager Punctuality Board, chaired by the Airport's Punctuality Manager, with delegates from handling agents and airlines proposes and tracks actions Punctuality targets are defined and broken down to each stakeholder Maybe an award/penalty pool for on-time performance Benchmark against other airports
System Integration	Delay codes and delays are captured or integrated into one 'global' system. That system should also allow to automatically track issues of a flight which could have caused the delay in case of disputes.
Communication/PR	Constant, effective communication among all stakeholders Maybe an award for the best punctuality improvement program
Empowerment	Agree on challenging yet achievable goals but leave it up to the partners to implement sustainable improvement Provide sufficient resources for punctuality management and improvement programs

Airlines, tell us your punctuality

The Association of European Airlines (AEA) used to publish the on-time performance (punctuality) of their associated airlines. It seems that their airline members would not allow this anymore. Certainly you can use Flightstats, however, the information may prove inaccurate and incomplete. Wolfram search has a nice feature to learn more about airlines (US only) delays. Just enter the search term 'causes of delay of delta airline' and you will find a nice summary of Delta's performance as an example.

In a bold new move, South African domestic carriers have agreed with Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) to publish their punctuality on the ACSA web site. Passengers can take this into consideration upon choosing their carrier and the Airport makes a clear statement about the strategic value of on-time performance.

I'd rather have this continuous level of transparency than campaigns of carriers or airports which coincidentially happened to be the most punctual recently - irrespective of their size, number of cancellations, and number of passengers affected.

Hidden Issues Behind 99.9% Service Level

Your IT Director is surely proud to constantly deliver 99.9 and more percentage of availability of systems and network. Though it is probably the most commonly used metrics, it is not necessarily the best metrics to use. It does not, for instance, tell you anything about the impact of a downtime or outage. What we usually would be presented are great uptime graphs like this one:

What does this tell us really?

Imagine this, due to a network or system issue, check-in is not possible for an hour. The check-in agents will have to fall back to manual check-in. In addition to cost of additional staff, this may result in flight delays. Again, what is your plan to address this? Buy more technology? What is the ROI?

What if you knew the delay cost of the affected flights and could relate this to the responsible IT department? You then could trade an investment off against the cost of downtimes.

Cost of delays in Europe 2010

Eurocontrol is publishing delay statistics of airports participating in the ECAC (European Civil Aviation Conference). In their recent report they provide an overview of the delay situation in 2010. This report was used by a number of news agencies (in German only, apologies) to list the worst airports in 2010.

I used the report to assess the total delay cost of ECAC in 2010. According to the information I retrieved from the report, adding a few assumptions on the average size of aircraft and seat load factor, I came up with impressive figures about departure delay cost:

In 2010 there were more than 7 billion Euros opportunity cost to passengers, more than 2 billion Euros operating cost to airlines and more than 400 million Euros operating cost to airports.

And I did not even include the cost of cancellations which were estimated at more than 100,000 flights at the April peak of the volcanic ashes crisis.

Revealed - five secrets of airlines to hide delays

Travel Inside, a Swiss travel magazine, reported beginning of September that Easyjet could improve its performance in August in Switzerland (Basel and Geneva) remarkably. More than 90% of all departures were on-time within 1 hour. What? ONE HOUR DELAY is still on-time? Would you consider your flight to be on-time with a delay of one hour? IATA thinks differently and defines a threshold of 15 minutes.

Airlines only cheat themselves with this policy. They waste their own very costly resource, their aircraft fleet, and even forget about knock-on effects.

There are many tricks of airlines (and airports) to hide real delays. Here are five of them:

1) Reschedule a flight; just publish a new scheduled time of departure, inform every passenger and you are done. It is a bit of a cancellation, but nicer done. A practice not really standard, but seems to work.

2) Compare off-chocks to estimated time of departure; instead of scheduled time of departure (STD), compare off-chocks with estimated time of departure (ETD) in your statistics. Saves you quite some delays.

3) Use your own standard to define when a flight is delayed; like Easyjet did with counting a flight as on-time when it is delayed for up to one hour.

4) Cancel a flight (or just not operate it); this is a very neat one. You can cancel delayed flights because of technical issues or weather conditions. Always works.

5) Change off-blocks time after take-off; some airlines use that, in particular internally, if not being monitored. Being very obvious, this magic is used with care, sometimes with the explanation that the time was not correct in ACARS.

Do you know more tricks? Happy to hear them.

Do you spend more when your flight is delayed?

When retail spending at an airport is stronger than passenger growth, it is a sign that the airport is encouraging travelers to spend more. The duty free revenue at Abu Dhabi International Airport outpaced passenger growth in the first half of 2010. According to Abu Dhabi Airports Company (ADAC), this is because consumer confidence is returning, and ADAC’s investment program and upgraded retail offerings.

Zurich Airport Shopping

From discussions with airport commercial managers I understand that there are a number of factors which influence the passenger spend rate. Some of them are mentioned above. One important factor seems to be dwell time which is the time, passengers spend at the airport. Obviously, waiting in a queue reduces the dwell time and hence reduces airport retail revenue. There is consent between retail and operations that the passenger flow should efficient (but not too efficient).

We wanted to know the impact of delays on passenger spend. There is a general perception in the industry that more delays mean more passenger spend. We wanted to prove them differently hoping to additionally support the case to improve on-time performance.

We compared passenger spend with delays at Zurich airport. Here is what we found:

• There is a trend towards lower revenue with better departure punctuality. At the same time the passenger spend rate declines with more delays.
• With more delays, delay cost offset additional retail revenue.
• Passenger spend rate fluctuates, irrespective of delays, in particular depending on passenger categories. For instance, during holiday season they are lower than year average. Should be considered in further analysis.

Six excuses for airports why punctuality cannot be improved

In a recent post I talked about the need to improve punctuality. I illustrated that the infamous metric 'percent on-time departures' is insufficient and inaccurately measuring the airport's or airline's performance. So if SAS claims to be the most punctual airline this summer then I salute them but I wonder what their actual on-time performance was. Wasn't there some airport closures? This is the first reason why there is no need to improve your on-time performance. You already seem to operate at a high level and the press and the public is happy.

The second reason not to bother is what an airport official from Sheremetyevo International said to Forbes, that in most cases, delayed departures are simply caused by flights arriving late from other airports.

As a third reason there is to mention that low-cost airlines frequently plan for short turnaround times on the ground. This can mean there is a higher likelihood of an aircraft possibly running late.

Let us not forget the capacity of airspace at many busy airports, air traffic also plays a role, as a fourth reason why we can't improve.

At the same time we can rely on Eurocontrol's delay analysis which says that more than 50% of all delays are caused by the airlines themselves. So, as a fifth argument, who should start to improve?

Last but not least we can disagree with the statistics, with the definition of punctuality (which flights to consider?) and the data source. Because airlines and airports do not want to provide flight information and share their on-time performance, there are some platforms like FlightStats that use any available data. We can argue, as a sixth point, that those figures are simply not correct.

Maybe you will find more of them and would like to share them with me.

Understanding airport passenger experience - information and communication

After a few bad experiences where the information about a flight delay was very poor I was looking for similar experiences of peers and came across this research for the UK Department of Transport about understanding airport passenger experience. It hits the bull's eye.

It says "Respondents wanted good, accurate and real‐time information flows to help them plan their journey and feel more in control, especially in departures, at boarding gates and in baggage areas. But information at airports – flight information especially ‐ was often perceived to be limited, unreliable and poorly displayed."

Looking at the delay information which is, for insiders, the (Public) Expected Time of Departure, or ETD, I simplified the categories of airports I experienced:

	Unknown or wrong ETD	Know and control ETD
Display delay/ETD	2	1
Do not display delay/ETD	4	3

• Airports in the first category are doing a great job. They work together with their partners, in particular ground handlers, monitor the ETD setting process and keep the passengers up to date about delays. Example would be a delay because the airport knows that the inbound flight is already delayed.
• Airports in the second category do display a delay but they just say "flight delayed" or they show an ETD which is ever changing. This can be really bad when updates only happen after it has become clear to everybody that the flight will be delayed.
  
• Airports of the third category do not publish delay information which sounds strange but it could be because of technical limitations or because they are in fact category two airports or because the airlines do not want them to publish any delays.
  
• Last but not least there are those airports in category four that may stem from the ancient times where airports only felt responsible for infrastructure and neither for operation nor for quality.

In fact, all of the above about delay information applies for any flight information which is displayed to the public. And, when I am talking about publishing reliable and up to date information I also trust that the staff should have the same level of information and attitude.

The need to improve punctuality

UK budget airline easyJet was given just 90 days to ensure more flights run on time - or it will be forced to change its name. Background being that the carrier only performed at around 50% punctuality at Gatwick airport.

At the same time and airport (Gatwick) British Airways was the most punctual major carrier in June 2010, with 87 per cent of short haul and domestic flights departing on time and 86 per cent of international flights on time.

Can you really compare this? What can easyJet do to improve?

In previous posts I was highlighting some flaws of punctuality (on-time performance in percent) as a metric.

• Cancellations improve punctuality
• Indicator ignores size of aircraft and number of passengers affected
• No assessment about the financial loss possible
• Responsibilities not allocated
• Difficult to determine improvement measures

It would be interesting to analyse the actual delay cost of both carriers, allocate responsibilities and then discuss differences and actions to improve. Certainly involving discussions around delay code assignment, reactionary delays and ownership.

It is great that punctuality is on top of the agenda. I am afraid, however, that the problem will be pushed around again because it is a bit more complicated than just punctuality in percent.

Johannesburg airport handles biggest ever swell of visitors

Most football fans visiting South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup are expected to use OR Tambo International Airport (ORTIA). In less than 50 days, the airport will serve as the gateway to South Africa for hundreds of thousands of 2010 FIFA World Cup fans and millions of future tourists. ACSA has upgraded facilities but has also invested in organisation and technologies to ensure great passenger experience.

I believe that an airport shows its competence in handling irregularities and events like the 2010 FIFA World Cup. A short glimpse at the current performance at ORTIA shows that the airport has managed to keep their on-time departures at a constant high level event though they currently serve about double the passengers per day compared to normal operation. A true mastery.

Accuracy of delay codes

Some airports call delay codes "lie codes". It is obvious that ground handlers will, in doubt, blame anybody else for delays because they may have service level agreements with their airlines. I have even come across airport where airlines insist on adjusting the off-blocks time so that they do not have to report a bad on-time performance to their headquarter.

How can this be changed i.e. improved? My little plan would include
- Accountability
- Transparency
- Standardization
- Governance
- System Integration

Accountability: Each delay code (with subcode) has an owner or responsible organization and the delay code assignment process is clear and in place (assign, accept, reject, handling of disputes, final call).

Transparency: The assignment and the on-time performance of each organization is transparent to everybody.

Standardization: There is only one definition of delay codes and delays across the airport based on IATA standard, incorporated in the Airport Handling Manual (AHM). Any non-conformance e.g. different reporting from an airline to its head office will be brought forward to the Governance Forum.

Governance: The Punctuality Board, chaired by the Airport's Punctuality Manager, with delegates from handling agents and airlines proposes and tracks action plans on punctuality. They define punctuality targets broken down to each stakeholder.

System Integration: Delay codes and delays are captured or integrated into one system. That system should also allow to automatically track issues of a flight which could have caused the delay in case of disputes.

Imported Airport Delays

Airports having a hub function are dependent on delays which are "imported" from other airports. An airport is to be considered an efficient airport when the departing flights are less delayed than the arriving flights. Compare your arrival punctuality with your departure punctuality and you have a first indicator on how efficient an airport is.

Note that airports without a hub function will perform better than hubs. They can compensate delays easier. But the operational efficiency is a good indicator for discussions where there is a general perception that delays are only "imported".

Resolve reactionary delays

Nearly half of all flight delays in Europe are actually "reactionary" or "knock-on" delays caused by previous late departures or arrivals, according to a new study of Eurocontrol. Unfortunately the study is an analysis and does not, despite some suggestions on adjusting the framework for reporting delays and improving the quality of the delay data captures, provide any means to tackle this issue.

We have come up with an approach to resolve reactionary delays. We found that we can attribute the delay cost to the original causer of the delay. That causer may still be within the airline (e.g. aircraft maintenance) but it is a much better decision tool than just 'reactionary delays'. It is still about responsibility here ... nobody feels responsible for reactionary delays.

Close an airport and you have 100% punctuality

I recently called an airport operation manager and congratulated him for his 100% punctuality during the closure of his airport due to volcanic ash. In fact, canceled flights improve an airline's and airport's on-time performance though passengers are stranded causing additional cost and lost revenue. This is one of the reasons why I believe that punctuality is an imperfect measure, even though the aviation industry uses it as a benchmark.

I would suggest to use delay cost per passenger as a benchmark. The total delay cost is the sum of passenger goodwill loss (measured in money terms), cash out, lost revenue, unproductive resource usage (aircraft, gates, stands, etc.). Then put this into relation to the number of departing passengers and you eventually know where you are compared to your benchmark airports. And, you can use this metric to set targets and to evaluate investments into on-time performance.