Virgin Australia recorded more than two times as many flight cancellations as both Qantas and Jetstar in the first month of the year, according to a new report.
The latest domestic airline on time performance report for January, written by the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, revealed Virgin Australia cancelled 5.4 per cent of the 11,026 domestic flights flown last month.
Meanwhile, Qantas and Jetstar cancelled less than 2.5 per cent of their respective 6984 and 8824 flights.
Among regional networks, QantasLink narrowly topped Virgin Regional Airlines, recording a cancellation rate of 2.6 per cent, just 0.01 per cent higher than Virgin Regional Airlines.
The Qantas network, including QantasLink, recorded 76.6 per cent of on time arrivals, while the entire Virgin Australian network recorded 67.9 per cent.
It comes a two airports in regional Queensland were among the top performing airports across the country.
Mount Isa and Emerald Airport recorded some of the highest numbers of on time departures and arrivals for domestic flights last month.
More than 83.3 per cent of flights arriving in Mount Isa were on time, and 79.2 of planes leaving Emerald were right on schedule.
However, in central Queensland, Mackay Airport recorded the lowest percentage of on time arrivals, with just 55.1 per cent of flights arriving at their designated time and Proserpine Airport had the lowest percentage of on time departures at 54.9 per cent.
The report also revealed the top performing routes flown throughout the country and flights between Townsville and Cairns proved to be among the top performers.
Skytrans was the country’s worst performing airline, with 15.4 per cent of flights cancelled and just 63.8 per cent of flights recorded to depart on time.
The report comes as more than 25,000 extra passengers are expected to move through Brisbane Airport’s domestic terminal for the Australian leg of Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated Eras Tour.
Airlines scheduled an additional 64 flights to Melbourne and Sydney to accommodate for the mass migration of Tay Tay fans across two weeks.
Up to 8500 passengers are anticipated to catch flights to Sydney after almost 4000 Swifities travelled to Melbourne for last week’s sell out shows at the MCG.
By the time the tour wraps up on Monday, it is anticipated that almost 3500 additional passengers from North Queensland and Central Queensland will have caught connecting flights to Sydney and Melbourne.
As Sydney prepares for possible thunderstorms on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning and temperatures of up to 35C on Friday, many Swifties are hoping bad weather will not cause cancellations across the network.