Owns up, that's to say, only in the sense that following my previous post it has made a series of unannounced, undocumented changes to the Q4 2018 "league table" (presumably in the hope that nobody will notice!), but with no explicit acknowledgement that anything has actually changed.
This time around, even a cursory glance at the results is sufficient to illustrate how absurd they are - instead of giving the airlines an average score of around 750 out of 1000, as with previous quarters' results (already grossly inflated), Heathrow has hiked the average score by over 8% to 813 points.
Heathrow has now retrospectively adjusted the average points scored by airlines in Q4 2018 from
813 to
727, and has likewise amended all the individual airline scores, without any acknowledgement whatsoever that anything has been changed. The newly-adjusted scores are still, of course, around 40% higher than they ought to be if the stated rules of the scheme were being followed.
Not content with inflating the scores even more than usual, Heathrow has also inexplicably excluded 5 of its 50 busiest airlines from the results.
We will never know how China Southern, El Al, Korean Air, Kuwait Airways or Pakistan International Airlines are judged to have performed, because Egyptair short/longhaul, Icelandair (ditto) and MEA longhaul (all with fewer flights than any of the above) have been substituted instead. In fact El Al and China Southern had over three times as many flights as MEA longhaul during Q4.
China Southern, El Al, Kuwait and PIA have now miraculously appeared in the results, although oddly Royal Air Maroc has also been added, despite having fewer flights than Korean Air (which is still absent).
The "league table" ranking, in descending order of points awarded by Heathrow, includes the bizarre sequence: 9th, 10th, 13th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 27th, 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 25th, 24th, 27th, 28th.
Happily, Heathrow has now discovered how to count from 1 to 50 without jumping forwards and backwards randomly.
For the second successive quarter, 180 flights by Finnair's A330 and A350 fleets (out of an airline total of 905) appear not to have been taken into account in calculating the results, with only its narrow-body A320 family flights having been counted.
All of Finnair's widebody flights now appear to have been considered in the revised results.
As I've noted in previous posts, you couldn't make this up, but at least we now know who has.
