Discover an Essential Analysis
On-time performance, still, is one of the essential quality factors when traveling by plane. However, it’s not solely up to the airline to ensure on-time performance. Airports highly influence punctuality too.
That’s why we did an in-depth analysis of the world’s most punctual airports. However, since we don’t want to compare apples with oranges, we clustered the most punctual airports according to their size. Size in this context relates to the number of departing scheduled seats.
- Mega airports: 30+ million seats
- Main airports: 20-30 million seats
- Large airports: 10-20 million seats
- Medium airports: 5-10 million seats
- Small airports: 2.5-5 million seats
Content Overview
Here are the details of what you will find in this blog post.
- Most punctual airports according to world regions
- Small Airports Top 20
- Medium Airports Top 20
- Large Airports Top 20
- Main Airports Top 20
- Mega Airports Top 20
- Punctuality comparison according to airports’ size
Analysis According to World Regions
Let’s provide a high-level overview before diving into the details. First, we wanted to know how the world’s most punctual airports are distributed across the globe. So we put together 20 airports with the best on-time performance of each size (mega, main, large, medium, and small) and analyzed the world regions.
The results show that more than 50% of the airports are located in North America (36.7%) or Europe (21.4%). Asia and South America both add 14 airports to the list, whereas the list contains only three airports from Africa and Central America.
World’s Most Punctual Small Airports
With 92.6%, Minsk wins the trophy for the best on-time performance. And worth mentioning, compared to all other airports, Minsk represents the world’s best on-time performance. There’s no airport in any other category that showed a better performance than 92.6%. Well done, Minsk!
Besides Minsk, small airports are quite diversified from a world region’s point of view. We can see airports from South America, North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. And all of them show solid 8x punctuality values.
Here are the detailed results:
| Rank | Airline | Country | Punctuality | Flights |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Osaka International | Japan | 97,0% | 4,227 |
| 2 | Nagoya Chubu | Japan | 96,6% | 4,227 |
| 3 | Kagoshima | Japan | 95,7% | 4,227 |
| 4 | Osaka Kansai | Japan | 95,4% | 4,227 |
| 5 | Sapporo | Japan | 93,1% | 4,227 |
| 6 | Tokyo Haneda | Japan | 91,7% | 4,227 |
| 7 | Okinawa | Japan | 91,6% | 4,227 |
| 8 | Chennai | India | 91,6% | 4,227 |
| 9 | Brisbane | Australien | 91,6% | 4,227 |
| 10 | Tokyo Narita | Japan | 91,4% | 4,227 |
World’s Most Punctual Medium Airports
Panama leads the list of most punctual medium-sized airports. Similar to Minsk, Panama outperformed the rest of the airports on this list massively. In addition, Panama showed an on-time performance, almost 8% better than Capetown, which wins the silver medal.
Besides Panama, the rest of the pack showed a solid performance ranging between 80% – 84% on-time performance. One interesting aspect: There’s not a single European airport on this list.
Here are the detailed results:
[table “” not found /]World’s Most Punctual Large Airports
Let’s move on to the big players. We are now in the airport league with 10-20 million departing seats. In this category, Osaka in Japan wins the gold medal. With 88%, Osaka puts St. Petersburg and Honululu to places two and three.
Here are the detailed results:
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World’s Most Punctual Main Airports
In the airport league with 20-30 million departing seats, Istanbul wins the gold medal with 83.42% on-time performance. The Turkish airport is followed by two U.S. airports: Minneapolis and Detroit. Worth mentioning that U.S. airports of this size show excellent performance. Eight out of the 15 most punctual main airports are located in the United States of America.
Here are the detailed results:
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World’s Most Punctual Mega Airports
And finally, here’s the champions league: Mega airports with more than 30 million departing seats. With 86.87, Moscow Sheremetyevo takes home the trophy in this category. However, with 86.6, Tokyo is very close behind Moscow. Singapore, another Asian airport, completes the list of the top-3.
Here are the detailed results:
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Punctuality Comparison According to Airports’ Size
When comparing the average on-time performance of airport sizes, it turns out that mega and main airports show a weaker performance than large, medium, or small airports. Additionally, with an average of 84.33%, small airports had the highest punctuality values of all airports.
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Source: Data shown in this blog post is based on OAG’s Punctuality League 2020
