PAL named among most punctual airlines in AsPac

MANILA, Philippines — Flag carrier Philippine Airlines (PAL) landed among the top performers in Asia and the Pacific for on-time flights in 2022, only bested by Japanese and Malaysian operators.

According to Cirium’s On-Time Review Performance 2022, the carrier placed among the five network winners in the Asia Pacific region for recording the fourth-best percentage of on-time arrivals.

Circum said PAL sent out a total of 76,308 flights in 2022, of which 76.42 percent made an on-time arrival. This was only beaten by All Nippon Airways’ (ANA) 89.79 percent and Japan Airlines’ 89.39 percent for 278,600 and 278,931 trips, respectively.

Malaysia Airlines also surpassed PAL’s performance with an on-time arrival of 81.17 percent for 98,673 flights.

On the other hand, the airline owned by taipan Lucio Tan beat Australian airlines Qantas’ 68.43 percent and Virgin Australia’s 66.69 percent.

The top performers in the region posted a total of 1.1 million flights in 2022 and landed 78.65 percent of them just on schedule.

Cirium recognizes winners in two categories: mainline operations, for routes operated solely by the carrier; and network operations, which includes flights marketed by the airline but flown by a partner.

PAL, Cirium said, also recorded a comp factor of 96.92 percent, beating Malaysia Airlines’ 94.65 percent but falling behind ANA’s 98.72 percent, Japan Airlines’ 98.53 percent, and Qantas’ 97.36 percent.

On the other hand, no Philippine carrier made it to the 10 best performers in Asia and the Pacific for mainline operations benchmarked by Thai AirAsia’s 91.56 percent, ANA’s 88.61 percent, and Japan Airlines’ 88 percent.

“Some things just haven’t changed in aviation. Japanese airlines and airports continue to deliver passengers to their arrival gates on time – pandemic or no pandemic,” Cirium said.

Cirium, however, asked airlines all over the world to address the staffing shortages that they are experiencing in their homeland and overseas operations.

The expert in aviation analy-tics added that the problem could no longer be tolerated this year given the resurgent demand for air travel.

“Although the aviation industry collectively worked hard to keep pace with recovering demand, they fell short in many cases due to staffing issues worldwide that necessitated reducing flights to work within staffing constraints,” Cirium said.

“Staffing shortages will continue to challenge the global air travel industry and could have long-term impacts affecting on-time performance and reliability in 2023 and beyond,” it added.