News / Loganair upbeat after progress in reliability
LOGANAIR’s new managing director has expressed his confidence that the airline is in a better place than a year ago after presenting its latest reliability and punctuality figures.
Jonathan Hinkles was in Shetland on Friday to update members of the islands’ external transport forum on the company’s next steps to further improve its performance.
He unreservedly apologised for the poor performance of the airline in 2014 and 2015 and said that this would not happen again under his watch.
The company’s performance in the third quarter of this year had been the best since 2014.
Just seven flights were cancelled and six flights experienced longer delays than three hours on the Shetland routes during July, August and September.
There were 35 cancellations of services to Sumburgh Airport in August due to the weather.
Overall, 88 per cent of flights in September 2016 operated within 15 minutes of its schedule, Hinkles said.
“We still have a lot to do, I am under no illusions about that. We still have bad days sometimes, but it is very different to where we were when we had whole months of bad days,” he told the meeting.
“We are in a very different place to where we were a year ago, and that’s a better place in terms of operational performance, whether it is our punctuality, our flight completion rate or indeed the number of customers contacting to claim compensation for flight delays,” he said.
“A year ago we had eight people working in our customer relations department just to keep pace with the workload that was coming in. That is now down to two.
“That is a reflection that the kind of issues we had has dropped significantly.”
Since last year, the airline has invested into their spare parts department in Glasgow, trained up more engineers and made changes to its operational schedules.
Hinkles told the meeting that the company’s refurbishment programme of its Saab 340 aircrafts was making steady progress with five of 13 such refurbishments completed and a further four expected for early next year.
He said he had no immediate plans to introduce new aircrafts on the route, adding that this was something that had to wait until early next decade.
Hinkles further told the forum that the airline was trialling a number of improvements such as boarding ramps and proactive customer communication on flight disruptions.
Meanwhile, speaking at the same meeting, managing director of ferry company Serco NorthLink, Stuart Garrett, said that its performance for 2016 has so far been ahead of expectation despite the drop in passenger traffic following the completion of the Shetland Gas Plant.
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