Sydney Airport: Qantas and Virgin Australia flights delays and cancellations as Swissport splashes cash

Qantas cancelled 198 Sydney-Melbourne flights last month. The company it outsourced baggage-handling to is paying $1000+ sign-on bonuses. Go behind the scenes of Sydney Airport’s dramas.

A sign-on bonus of $1000-plus has been paid to recruit new baggage handlers and check-in staff at beleaguered Sydney Airport.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal the incentive was offered by Swissport, which Qantas now uses for its ground services at Mascot.

In a further example of the acute worker shortage crippling the airport, The Daily Telegraph has also learnt that up to 20 Certis security staff are catching the train from T2 Domestic to the international terminal part-way through their weekday shifts so three or four more lanes of passenger screening can open, thereby easing congestion.

This did not happen before Covid.

Certis has previously offered $1000 bonuses to airport security staff to encourage them to work over the Easter peak.

There was more chaos and delays at Sydney Airport this week. Picture: Twitter/@ChauDave

While it’s understood the sign-on bonus offered by Swissport in Sydney and Melbourne has plugged its ground services gap, Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert told The Telegraph security staff numbers were still 20 to 30 per cent shy of where they needed to be.

“So we are constantly shifting people around during the day to meet the demand,” Mr Culbert said.

Prior to the pandemic, about 30,000 people worked for the 800 companies at the airport, but during two years of aviation hibernation, about 15,000 jobs were lost.

While 7500 positions have been filled, the air hub still needs at least 5000 more to operate the way it used to.

Finding people for those jobs has proven tough due to the tightest labour market since the 1970s, and because the industry isn’t as attractive as it once was, with heightened concerns about job security.

The lack of labour has been made worse during this winter, with Covid and the flu knocking out as much as 20 per cent of the people working all types of jobs at Mascot.

The sick rate among Qantas pilots has been running at 2½ times normal levels, the Flying Kangaroo’s domestic and international chief Andrew David told The Telegraph.

“You can’t plan for that,” Mr David said.

Mr David said the national carrier was recruiting more than 1000 people to help lift its on-time performance rates and reduce cancellations.

It was part of the reason why Qantas’s on-time departure performance in June for the key Sydney to Melbourne route was just 56 per cent, with an incredible 198 flights to the Victorian capital cancelled — more than 22 per cent of scheduled services.

For the same month of 2019, nearly 80 per cent of Qantas flights to Melbourne departed when they were supposed to and less than 9 per cent were cancelled.

Qantas is not alone in struggling to meet customer expectations. Virgin’s result on that key route was no better.

Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

Mr David said the national carrier was recruiting more than 1000 people to help lift its on-time performance rates and reduce cancellations.

“They will get better in August and get better again in September,” he vowed.

That improvement will be aided by a statistical trick — Qantas is cutting the number of flights out of Sydney to give it a better shot at delivering advertised services.

So is Virgin Australia, its spokeswoman confirmed.

Improving service performance is not the only reason for the capacity cuts. An aviation fuel price surge has made partially empty flights uneconomic.

The airport’s Mr Culbert said it was “going to take another six to 12 months to get back to” normal.

Appealing to the federal government, he said “it would really help if we accelerated migration into the country, sped up visa processing times, and cleared the backlog.”

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