Qantas crew behind system to board domestic passengers earlier

Qantas has made another big change to its boarding process to help get aircraft away on time, or even ahead of schedule.

Qantas is boarding passengers earlier to improve on time performance. Picture: Supplied.

Qantas has started boarding flights up to eight minutes earlier in an effort to improve on-time performance.

The change means passengers on domestic flights operated by Boeing 737-800s board up to 30 minutes from takeoff instead of the standard 22 minutes.

Qantas integrated operations centre chief Daniel Dihen said the earlier boarding was already making a huge difference, with 70 per cent of early morning flights actually taking off ahead of schedule.

“We know on time performance drives customer satisfaction and it helps Qantas as well because ultimately we need to move our aircraft on time and we need to be able to move our crew as well,” said Mr Dihen.

“The minute you’ve got a delay, it’s almost like a snowball effect. You will land multiple delays off the back of that, so our first wave of flights is really important to us.”

He said Qantas knew if it could get those first flights of the day away on time, it would set the day up for success so they went about working out how to make it happen.

“We got a few of our crew together from across the business to say ‘if we wanted to get our planes away early for those first flights, how would we do that?’,” M Dihen said.

“It was really a case of support from our front-line teams who said ‘we can do this, the crew are at the airport early enough, we know our customers are at the gate five minutes early so rather than just waiting around why don’t we board the plane early?’.”

As a result, 70 per cent of Qantas’ first wave of flights were departing a couple of minutes ahead of schedule, in a “huge win for customers”.

“Eight minutes is quite a long time, and that’s allowing us to close the door and push back one or two minutes ahead of our scheduled departure time, which puts us in a better position and sets every Qantas customer up for success as well,” said Mr Dihen.

Although the initiative was only being used for domestic flights, Qantas was preparing to extend the practice to New Zealand services operated by 737s.

“Across the Tasman it’s a longer flight and when you’ve got seasonal winds you tend to lose some time en route so every minute matters,” he added.

Qantas’ Integrated Operations Centre head, Daniel Dihen. Picture: Jane Dempster

The early boarding strategy was intended to complement the “group boarding by numbers” initiative rolled out by Qantas to the four major airports last month.

Together the practices were aimed at cementing Qantas’ position as the most punctual domestic airline in the country after a difficult ramp up post-Covid.

Data for May showed Qantas was well on its way to pre-pandemic levels, with 80.6 per cent of flights departing on time, and 79.4 per arriving within 15 minutes of schedule.

The figures put Qantas ahead of low fares partner Jetstar and rivals Rex and Virgin Australia although cancellation rates remained above 2019 rates at 2.6 per cent.

Mr Dihen said numerous factors contributed to cancelled flights, including weather, airspace restrictions, crew availability and technical issues.

But he insisted commercial reasons – such as insufficient passengers – never led to schedule changes.

“It’s a myth that carriers cancel flights because there’s not enough passengers on them,” he said.

“If we cancel a flight our aircraft becomes stranded, and our crew becomes stranded, and you can compromise a slot into a major port by not operating a service so it’s in our best interest to fly the aircraft.”

Originally published as Qantas crew behind system to board domestic passengers earlier