Air Niugini continues to achieve the highest level of schedule reliability in the last three months, again outperforming many airlines in Australia and the Pacific.
When compared with Australia’s major airlines’ performance in their domestic sector for the last three months, Air Niugini’s domestic on time departure performance (flights leaving within 15 minutes of the scheduled departure time) sat at 81% as compared for the last month with the Qantas Group at 65% and Virgin Australia with 66.7%.
In this three months Air Niugini operated over 5,500 flights with more than 90% of these being domestic within PNG connecting Papua New Guineans.
The cancellation rate for the last 12 months to August has been under 3% compared to the Qantas Group which cancelled 9.7% of all their services, Jetstar having cancelled 11.9% of all flights and Virgin Australia cancelling 8.2% of their flights for the same period.
Air Niugini’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Bruce Alabaster is impressed with the continuous positive results.
He said, “To be able to continuously achieve such a result in an environment like this against other larger regional airlines is not easy, I commend all staff from our porters to the traffic officers, those at check-in, pilots, engineers, catering, flight planning, commercial staff and everyone else for a job well done.”
Mr Alabaster confirmed that this strong performance has allowed the airline to return to profitability after a tough two years when the international borders were closed due Covid-19.
He noted this is allowing investment into better product offerings for the travelling public, including new sales offices in Gerehu and 8 Mile in Port Moresby, and new ECM lounges at Kavieng and Goroka.
Additional sales offices and ECM lounges will also be opened as well as other exciting new offerings which will be unveiled over the next couple of months.