By Paul Bibby
FLIGHTS on Australia's busiest domestic airline route, between Sydney and Melbourne, are among the least reliable.
In November almost a third of flights to Melbourne arrived late, figures released by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics yesterday show.
Late departures were also common: for 26.5 per cent of flights passengers waited more than 15 minutes to board; 4.7 per cent of flights were cancelled.
The figures are part of a continuing poor record for the crucial route which is used by tens of thousands of intercity commuters each week.
Aviation experts have pointed to industrial disputes involving aircraft engineers and air traffic controllers as contributing to the figures, as well as the inability of airlines and Sydney Airport to meet demand.
A Sydney Airport spokesman, Michael Samaras, said staffing issues at Airservices Australia might have been a factor.
"It has been widely publicised that [those] issues have had an impact on the performance of services across Australia," Mr Samaras said.
"There were no significant operational issues at Sydney Airport in November that would have adversely impacted airline on-time performance."
The poor results for the Sydney-Melbourne route reflected a broader trend in domestic air travel, with flights leaving later and being cancelled more often.
The bureau's figures show on-time performance was between 2 per cent and 5 per cent worse in November than the same month in 2007.
Overall, flights departed on time just 78.5 per cent of the time, compared with 79.9 per cent in November 2007, and on-time arrivals fell to 75.9 per cent from 77.4 per cent. Cancellations increased to 2.1 per cent from 1.4 per cent.
The industry's long-term performance averages (85 per cent for departures and 83.7 per cent for arrivals) are little more than a memory for domestic travellers, who regularly spend more time in the departure lounge than on a plane.
A spokesman for the Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, said the results were better than those recorded in 2007.
"The results are above the lows recorded in the middle of 2008 but are still well below levels recorded prior to May 2007," the spokesman said.
Qantas has had a number of highly publicised flight delays recently - including a 24-hour wait for passengers on a flight from Canberra to Sydney, in which water and toilet paper had to be rationed.
Nevertheless, Qantas was the best of the domestic carriers, with 79.8 per cent of departures on time. Virgin Blue recorded the worst result, with 76.3 per cent.
"We were confident that we would return to industry leading position as far as on time performance is concerned," the executive general manager of Qantas, John Borghetti, said.
"We are now very close to the levels we offered before the engineers' industrial action."
The poor performance results for domestic flights across the country did not deter Australians from air travel.
There were 4.22 million passengers on domestic routes in November, a record for the month and an increase of 2.1 per cent on November 2007.
The total number of passengers carried in the year ending November 2008 reached 50.33 million, also a record and an increase of 7.2 per cent on the previous year.
"Revenue passenger kilometres performed totalled 4.77 billion for the month, up 2.8 per cent over November 2007," Mr Albanese's spokesman said.
"Capacity, measured by available seat kilometres, reached 6.12 billion for the month, an increase of 6.8 per cent over November 2007."
In November, Sydney Airport accounted for 22.3 per cent of all domestic passenger movements, followed by Melbourne with 19.9 per cent, Brisbane with 14.5 per cent, Perth with 6.7 per cent and Adelaide with 6.1 per cent.
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