Considering the less than sterling reputation of the Indonesian airline industry (most recently tarnished by the antics of an allegedly drunken pilot who was almost allowed to take off in a Citilink airplane), many travelers in Indonesia expect delays as a given.
But while delays can be expected in many Indonesian airports, Surabaya’s Juanda International Airport is not one of them. According to UK travel analyst OAG’s Punctuality League 2016 report, Juanda is the most punctual large airport in the world (with “”large” in this case being defined as an airport with 10-20 million departing seats per year).
According to OAG’s analysis, Juanda has an impressive On Time Performance (OTP) of 90.3%. The OTP metric measures what percentage of arriving and departing flights operated within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival and departure times in 2016.
In fact, Juana had one of the highest OTP ratings of any airport in the world. In the major airport category (over 20 million departing seats per year) Tokyo’s Haneda airport came in 1st with an OTP of 87.49%. Only the UK’s Birmingham’s Airport, which placed 1st in the medium airport category, with an OTP of 91.28%, and Newcastle Airport which took 1st in the small airport category with an OTP of 90.94%, beat Surabaya.
To be completely honest, we’re kind of shocked to see any Indonesian airport near the top of a punctuality list (mainly because of the reputation that certain Indonesian airlines have for being consistently late) but we’ll trust that OAG’s data is indeed accurate and Surabaya does indeed deserve this honor.
That being the case, can the managers at Juanda in charge of keeping flights on schedule please come teach their counterparts at Soekarno-Hatta a thing or two? (Actually… maybe they should do that after they make sure that all pre-flight procedures are being properly followed at Juanda – considering that is the airport at which the allegedly drunk Citilink pilot almost took off from).
