Qantas calm in eye of storm with Amadeus delay recovery system

The airline’s new automated delay recovery system was put to the test by last weekend’s torrid storms.

Cancelled flights were kept to a minimum at Sydney airport. Picture: John Grainger.

It was a baptism of water rather than fire for Qantas last weekend when the airline’s newly installed automated delay recovery system was put to the test by the torrid storms that battered Australia’s east coast and shut down airport runways.

Flights to and from Sydney airport were hit with delays of up to two hours and scores of services were cancelled as winds of up to 98km/h and torrential rain forced the closure of all but one runway at the nation’s busiest airport.

But Qantas was able to weather the storm thanks to the new Amadeus automated delay recovery system which kept cancelled flights to a minimum.

The multi-million-dollar system — which was installed in October last year — makes use of big data analytics to respond quickly to adverse weather conditions so the airline can pre-emptively shuffle slots and prioritise landing and take-offs across its main line, QantasLink and Jetstar networks.

“It put us in the best position to manage the disruption to our operations over the weekend and meant our customer contact team could notify a large number of our customers before they were even on their way to the airport,” said Qantas Integrated Operations Centre head Paul Fraser.

As the storms rolled in and caused delays to departures and arrivals across NSW, just 15 of Qantas’s 436 scheduled flights (3.4 per cent) across its network were cancelled during the weekend. The airline’s on-time performance score also remained high at 86 per cent on Saturday and 62 per cent on Sunday.

In comparison, Virgin Australia — which uses a time-consuming manual system to plan delay responses for each flight — suffered some 70 cancellations out of 320 flights (22 per cent) over the weekend. Virgin’s on-time performance for the weekend came in at 74 per cent on Saturday and 48 per cent on Sunday.

“Improving our operations with Schedule Recovery has been enormously successful for us,” Mr Fraser said. “We were able to quickly make a plan to spread our flights out across the day, combine flights together, swap aircraft around and distribute slot times between Qantas, QantasLink and Jetstar to minimise the impact.”