Delta Air Lines has been named the world's most punctual major international airline during 2018 by FlightGlobal, incorporating FlightStats.
The US carrier takes the On-Time Performance Service (OPS) Award for the second year running.
Some 86.09% of the SkyTeam member's mainline flights arrived at the gate within 14min 59s of scheduled arrival time last year.
Blockade-hit Qatar Airways takes second place for mainline operations in the major international airline ranking – which covers the top 25% of carriers by network size. The Gulf carrier achieved an on-time performance of 85.88%. It is closely followed by KLM in third spot, ANA in fourth and Aeroflot in fifth.
Qatar Airways tops the ranking for network performance among the top 25% major international airlines – including flights marketed by a carrier but flown by partners such as regional operators. Delta drops to fourth, as non-mainline flights nudge its score down slightly. KLM is in second and ANA third. Alitalia is fifth, despite spending the year in administration.
Among the rankings by region – which feature the top 50% of airlines by network size in each territory – JAL and ANA take the top spots in Asia-Pacific for mainline and network operations respectively. JAL was excluded from the major international airline category this year, despite regularly featuring among the top performers in that category in recent OPS Awards, because the number of destinations it serves was insufficient to place it among the world's top 25% carriers by network size during 2018.
Panama's Copa Airlines wins in Latin America for both categories, achieving a mainline performance of 89.68% and a network score of 90.16%. Copa's network size in 2018 meant it did not qualify for the major international airlines category.
The spoils are shared in the low-cost carrier category, a ranking of those budget airlines among the world's top 90% by network size. Brazil's Azul and Spain's Iberia Express top the chart with an identical on-time performance of 86.47%. They are followed by Spirit Airlines and IndiGo with scores of 82.04% and 81.10% respectively.
The OPS Awards rankings are determined through analysis of more than 120,000 flights per day, along with real-time status reports plus departure and arrival data curated from more than 600 global sources.
To view the full results and methodology, click here
Source: Cirium Dashboard
