Lowest ever inflight delays recorded – down by 52%

New Zealand’s lowest ever inflight delays were recorded in the quarter of May, June and July 2014, down 52% on the same period from the previous two years.

Airways New Zealand’s deployment of a leading-edge integrated air traffic flow and arrival management system has resulted in the lowest inflight delay minutes ever recorded across New Zealand’s four largest airports.

The 52% decrease in inflight delay minutes was recorded for domestic and international flights into and out of Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington and Queenstown – comparing the average 2,764 minutes of delay for May, June and July 2014 to the average monthly minutes from the same quarter in 2012 and 2013.

These results are a direct outcome of integrating Barco’s OSYRIS Arrival Manager (AMAN) tool into Airways’ Collaborative Flow Manager (CFM) system in April 2013, for arrivals into Auckland Airport, says Pauline Lamb, Chief Operating Officer at Airways.

“These excellent inflight delay reductions are evidence that this world-class system is delivering real savings to our airlines, both financial and environmental, without impacting on safety or service delivery,” Mrs Lamb says.

“We estimate that the Arrivals Manager system, aside from significantly reducing inflight delay, has reduced more than 1,770 tonnes of CO₂ emissions for our customer airlines and saved them at least $735,000 in fuel since July 2013. CFM/AMAN, together with other technology and service improvements we’ve made, has saved our airlines more than 11 million kilograms of fuel in 2013-14 – this equates to about $15 million of fuel savings,” she adds.

The AMAN tool was integrated into Airways’ CFM solution to eliminate air traffic bottlenecks and holding patterns at Auckland Airport – one of Australasia’s busiest international airports. Airlines interact directly with the CFM system to prioritise their flights according to their own business needs – subject to available slots, runway capacity and trajectory predictions updated by the system in real time.  At Auckland Airport, 35% of air traffic is international and 65% is domestic.

“Together with our airlines, we’re making big improvements in flow management and sequencing of flights into Auckland. The benefits are significantly lower carbon emissions, reduced fuel burn, and far fewer delays if compared alongside European measures,” Mrs Lamb says.

Inflight delay times into Auckland are measured for the full flight – wheels off the runway to wheels on the runway.  Other air navigation service providers around the world have different measurements, such as only measuring delays against scheduled departure time, and taking little account of inflight holding.

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