An intriguing war has been waged for most of this year as airlines vie for the crown of Australia's most reliable carrier – a must-have for any airline hoping to attract business flyers.
Qantas last year reacted to a period of poor performance in 2008 as a result of maintenance issues and, in 2010, has reclaimed what it regards as its rightful title: best on-time performance.
It was also a title Virgin Blue had to challenge for if it were serious about attracting business travellers who normally use Qantas, but VB has spent most of this year battling unexplained demons.
Not only has it been slipping behind Qantas for on-time arrivals, at times it has also had an extraordinarily high rate of flight cancellations.
But there were no publicly known maintenance issues at Virgin Blue, which has a near-new fleet of planes. In fact, founder and former boss Brett Godfrey had said he did not want to own (or lease) any aircraft more than eight years old, a policy even more financially demanding than the regime at carriers like Singapore Airlines, which starts unloading its "old" planes when they are 10-12 years of age.
Because it has a large engineering operation, Qantas, on the other hand, has been known to keep planes for more than 20 years, though the limits to that policy have been exposed in the past two years as the national carrier as been crunched by the late delivery of Airbus A380s and Boeing 787 Dreamliners, originally promised in 2008 but still engaged in a much-delayed certification program.
The recent A380 issues have simply worsened the problem, though Qantas domestically has maintained its reliability record.
But it was still a major surprise on Friday when Virgin Blue's October's figures put it well ahead of Qantas for the first time this year.
The government figures were published as Virgin Blue claimed it had increased the number of corporates it had attracted as a result of its new deal with Etihad Airways, which allows it to code-share daily one-stop services to about a dozen European cities, on top of its own V Australia services to the US.
By the way, the most reliable airlines aren't the majors like Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin Blue and Tiger (which is by far the worst of the majors for on-time performance), but the independent regional carrier, Perth-based Skywest. Both Skywest and Rex are the industry's best for flight cancellations.
In October, Rex cancelled only two flights out of 5697 and Skywest one out of 1099 while the worst of the majors, Virgin Blue, cancelled 118 out of 12,151 (one per cent), though Jetstar cancelled a higher percentage (81 or 1.5 per cent).
Both Skywest and Rex fly older planes (Saab 340, Fokker 100 and Fokker 50) that are no longer built, but cost less to own, as a result of which both carriers have standby planes that can be swung into action if any of their fleets has a technical issue.
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