MAJOR PUNCUALITY ACHIEVEMENTS BY SRILANKAN AIRLINES

SriLankan Airlines has achieved consistently high punctuality levels for timely flight departures around its network for over a year.

Between October 2000 and October 2001, 85 per cent of all flights departed within 15 minutes of scheduled departure time and 76 per cent of all flights took off within three minutes of scheduled departure time.

SriLankan flies to 27 cities in 20 countries and currently has 154 Flight departures a week around its network.

A new fleet of A330s and a concerted effort by the airline's Punctuality Improvement Committee (PIC) in Colombo has achieved sound results.

The Punctuality Improvement Committee comprises all operational departments involved in flight departures such as Flight Operations, Engineering and Maintenance, Cargo, Airport Service, Inflight Service, Catering, Schedules Planning and Security.

Such is the emphasis that the airline's management has placed on punctuality that the PIC, headed by the Chief Technical Officer, meets everyday to review flight departures for the previous 24 hours.

Reasons for delays are ascertained and remedial action taken with a commitment to ensure that shortcomings are eliminated. To this end, procedures are changed if necessary, to prevent recurrence of a delay. New policies are also adopted if the PIC is of the opinion that a policy change would help to improve punctuality.

"We recently introduced a superior product by way of the Airbus A330 and A340 and the inflight features they offer," says SriLankan's Chief Technical Officer Richard Hutton.

"What is also vitally important to ensure an overall quality product is on-time departure. We thus placed priority on punctuality and are glad to have seen sustained results over a period of time. In fact, our winning the Skytrax Airline of the Year 2000 award for Central Asia and eighth place in Wanderlust magazine's survey of best airlines is in part due to high level of punctuality."

The PIC looks into delays at overseas stations on the very next day. If, for example, the handling agent in an overseas station causes the delay, then the matter is taken up with them.

In its efforts to ensure on-time performance, SriLankan is also in constant dialogue with external agencies such as Customs, Immigration, Air Traffic Control to ensure there are no snags in the entire service chain.

"The aim of the PIC is to have a delay-free airline, a daunting task, but one we are committed to," says Sampath Perera, SriLankan's Manager PIC/Recruitment and Emergency Planning.

SriLankan's fleet currently comprises three A340s, four A330s and one A320.