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London Traffic Grows, but Delays Grow Twice as Fast
The UK CAA has reported traffic stats for August 2015. The five London airports handled more than 96,000 arrivals and departures, an increase of 4.8% over August 2014. Well done, you might think.
But, more than 30,000 of these flights were delayed by 15 minutes or more. This is an increase of more than 11% on the number of flights delayed in August 2014. Not so well done, then.
This demonstrates a rule of thumb for constrained airports: every new flight scheduled into a constrained airport will be delayed; and it will, in turn, delay at least one existing flight that had previously been operating on time.
Why is the aviation industry, with the most advanced technology and the highest cost resource inputs of all the transport modes, content to have 20% or more of its flights failing to meet schedule by 15 minutes or more. For London in August, it was worse than that. 15% of all flights were more than 30 minutes behind schedule.
During the London Olympics, London’s Heathrow airport demonstrated that it is possible to reduce delayed flights to a very low percentage. Or, to put that the other way, Heathrow ran at 110% of its announced capacity.
But to do that requires the airlines to cooperate with a performance regime directed by the airport and the ANSP. Oh.
Why are airlines unwilling to do this, when their customers would benefit and the airlines could make significant cost savings?
There would appear to be at least two reasons: First, the airlines are comfortable for accountability for delays to be so blurred that on most occasions they can advise passengers that the delay is beyond their control and caused by the airport or ATC or an aircraft from another airline or traffic or weather.
Secondly, airlines want the freedom to add more flights into constrained airports, even when they know it will cause delays to the flights already operating. Then, they can argue they are responding to market demands.
