Sydney airport has been named among the world’s worst airports for flight cancellations and delays in the past two months.
Data compiled by the flight tracking and data platform FlightAware ranked Sydney sixth-worst for flight cancellations, with 5.9% of flights cancelled, and ninth-worst for delays, with 34.2% of flights affected.
There were fresh scenes of chaos at the airport on Monday morning as huge queues for security checking snaked outside the domestic terminal.
Thousands in the security que for @VirginAustralia @JetstarAirways at @SydneyAirport. Through the terminal, out into a car park, then jammed through the back of the terminal. #airportchaos pic.twitter.com/hKDHHIoqW4
— Penny McCall Howard (@PMcHoward) July 24, 2022
Ben Fisher got to the airport at 6.15am thinking he would be able to enjoy a calm coffee before he travelled to the Sunshine Coast for business, but had to wait in the security queue for more than two hours.
“Chaos doesn’t come even nearly close to it,” Fisher told the Guardian.
He said because of the lack of signage and communication from the airport people joined the queue assuming it was for check-in and waited hours, only to discover they had to go check in and rejoin the security queue anew.
reporting in from my experience of the sydney airport security queue- this is where I started earlier this morning, took me an hour and a half to get through (after my boarding time was called to the front) pic.twitter.com/JoB4OVRC0B
— Jordy Silverstein (@jordana_s_) July 24, 2022
Fisher said when he joined the queue it stretched outside “halfway around to the terminal”.
In the end there was no need to rush as his flight was delayed by an hour.
A Sydney airport spokesperson told the Guardian that “heavy fog affected flights earlier this morning, and a technical issue has meant we’re temporarily operating one less security lane than normal in T2 Domestic”.
“We’re sorry about the queues and are working with airlines to get everyone on their way.”
Extreme weather, school holidays and staff shortages have been to blame for the long queues experienced earlier this month.
The latest national data from the transport department shows on-time performance for airlines across the country is at an all-time low.
For June 2022, all routes operated by Australian airlines (Jetstar, Qantas, QantasLink, Rex Airlines, Virgin Australia and Virgin Australia Regional Airlines) averaged 63% for on-time arrivals and 61.9% for on-time departures.
In the same period last year the rate was 84% for both.
The cancellation rate for the month was 5.8%.
“These are the worst On Time Performance figures recorded since recording commenced in November 2003,” the department wrote on the latest monthly update.
Jetstar had the lowest percentage of on-time departures with only a little above half (55.7%) leaving on time, followed by Qantas (58.7%).
Sydney airport declined to comment on the rankings.
A Qantas Group spokesperson said “these flight delays and cancellations are not the kind of performance that we were delivering pre-Covid and we know they are not at the level that our customers expect”.
The spokesperson said that a rise in Covid and other illnesses among airline crew as well as the tight labour market led to flight disruptions for all domestic airlines in June.
Rostering additional crew on standby helped lessen the impact of Covid-related absences and meant 85% of domestic flights for the month departed within an hour of their scheduled departure time, Qantas said.
“Everyone at Qantas and Jetstar is focused on turning this performance around,” the spokesperson said.“Flight cancellations this month are lower than they were in June, call centre wait times are now better than they were pre-Covid and our mishandled bag rates are close to what they were before the pandemic.”
