The world’s most punctual airlines in 2022 were…

By Maureen O’Hare | CNN

This week we’ve seen air passengers stranded in the Philippines after a power outage, flight delays in Florida and Denver, as well as the ongoing saga of Southwest Airlines’ winter holiday meltdown.

Welcome to 2023, where an airline actually being punctual is headline news. The airline in question is South American carrier Azul Brazilian Airlines, which last year had the best on-time performance globally, according to a new report by aviation analytics firm Cirium.

During what was a particularly chaotic 12 months for aviation, Azul Brazilian operated nearly 280,000 flights last year and 88.93% of them arrived within 15 minutes of its scheduled time at the gate — Cirium’s performance measure.

Elsewhere in South America, Chile’s LATAM Airlines (86.31% punctuality across more than 450,000 flights) took fourth place on Cirium’s ranking of international airlines and Colombia’s Avianca (83.48% and nearly 145,000 flights) was sixth.

America leads the way for airports

The United States was also well represented, both for airlines and airports.

For the second year in a row, Delta Airlines was given the Cirium Platinum Award for global operational excellence, which weighs up punctuality alongside operational complexity and an airline’s ability to limit the impact of flight disruption to its passengers.

While Delta only made fifth place on the global leaderboard, an impressive 83.63% of its million-plus flights were on time.

United Airlines (80.46%) was in eighth place and American Airlines (78.29%) at No.10, while Southwest lagged behind with 74.06%.

Six out of the world’s top ten most punctual airports were in the US, with Salt Lake City International Airport placing highest. Cirium reports that 83.87% of its 226,545 flights took off within 15 minutes of their scheduled departure time.

Bad year for Britain

Asia-Pacific was considerably slower to open up air travel post-Covid compared to the rest of the world. Japan reopened its international borders in October and two of its airlines — All Nippon Airways (88.61%) and Japan Airlines 88.00% — were No.2 and No.3 on Cirium’s leaderboard.

Japan’s StarFlyer was named the world’s leading low-cost carrier (95.23% punctuality across nearly 22,000 flights) and Tokyo’s Haneda the top airport performer globally for on-time departures (90.33% punctuality across more than 370,000 flights).