Sydney Airport increasingly contained to single runway

The federal government is currently evaluating an independent review of the Sydney Airport Demand Management Scheme, which took submissions from relevant airlines and airports affected by the scheduling and movement cap.

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“Flight delays and cancellations are incredibly frustrating for travellers and have a ripple effect that hurts productivity, jobs and the economy. A lot of this could be fixed by reforming decades-old regulation that prevents the airport being able to catch up after disruptions, reforms that wouldn’t involve a single extra flight than what is currently allowed,” a Sydney Airport spokesperson said.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Research Economics is yet to provide its November airline performance update, but Australia’s largest airlines have confirmed the restrictions at Sydney Airport impacted the number of delays and cancellations.

Qantas’s chief operations officer Colin Hughes said the winds had caused a “few headaches” for the carrier last month, but the airline has built in resilience to get most customers to their destinations on time.

About 70 per cent of Qantas flights were on time last month and 3.6 per cent were cancelled. After a torrid couple of months earlier in the year, the carriers mishandled baggage rate has been back at pre-COVID levels since September.

“We have extra aircraft and crew on standby, which means when disruptions occur from things like extremely high winds and thunderstorms, we can recover customers much quicker than we did earlier in the year,” Hughes said.

“This operational buffer will be in place right through the busy summer period,” Hughes continued.

Virgin Australia confirmed their operations had also been affected by the single runway restrictions.

October’s BITRE data shows 3 per cent of scheduled services were cancelled last month and just under 70 per cent of flights arrived and departed on time. The average number of on-time arrivals and departures for the same period in 2019 was about 82 per cent, with 1.5 per cent of flights cancelled.

Just 65 per cent of Virgin’s domestic flights arrived on time in October, according to the government data, slipping behind the Qantas group’s 74 per cent and Regional Express’s 68 per cent.

Jetstar took the crown for the most cancellations in October with 3.9 per cent, followed by Virgin’s 3.6 per cent. Rex and Qantas’ rate hovered around 2 per cent.

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