Heathrow this week revealed the results from its Fly Quiet & Green programme for Q2 2019.
For Q2, as with previous quarters, league table scores have again been inflated, this time by
43% compared to the results that are produced when Heathrow's own published methodology and performance rankings are used. Once again that increase has not been applied uniformly across all of the 50 airlines considered (some of the poorer performing carriers have been awarded more than double the number of points that they merit), with the result that the relative league table positions are significantly distorted.
A more detailed look at the Q2 table shows:
a) Individual airline scores are inflated by between
11% and
177%, with the poorest performing carriers receiving the biggest unjustified increase in their score. For example, the
599 points score awarded by Heathrow to Saudia is
383 points more than the airline actually merits under Heathrow's own rules, based on its published performance metric rankings (it's in the bottom third of the table for every one of the seven metrics, including two 48th places).
b)
All but one of the 50 airlines in Heathrow's table are awarded more than the correctly calculated overall
average score (based on Heathrow's data and methodology) of
530 points (from a maximum possible 1,000 points).
c) American Airlines, Aegean and TAP are given an unexplained hike up the table, by 15, 14 and 14 places respectively, compared to the positions that their performance merits.
d) Among the airlines entitled to feel aggrieved with this quarter's published results include Air France, relegated 16 places from its rightful position, together with China Southern (as always) and Japan Airlines, each unjustifiably demoted by 15 places. Kuwait Airways, despite meriting
528 points by Heathrow's own methodology, putting it just above Air India, bizarrely ends up ranked 21 places and
186 points below the Indian carrier.
e) "RAG" (red/amber/green) classifications are again applied inconsistently; for example El Al and China Southern, ranked 46th and 50th, respectively, by Heathrow for early/late movements, get an "Amber" for that category while Swiss, ranked 32nd for that metric by Heathrow, gets a "Red".
f) Heathrow's results, which aim to compare the "top 50" airlines (defined by number of flights in Q2) inexplicably omit Korean Air, while Royal Air Maroc (with fewer flights) is included.
g) SAS and BA shorthaul have been propelled into joint first place (even though Qantas actually performed better than SAS and
five airlines out-performed BA, based on Heathrow's data and methodology). We're asked to believe that BA scored only 52 points short of a "perfect" 1,000 despite coming close to bottom (44th out of 50) for engine emissions and two-thirds of the way down the rankings for Night Quota compliance. It turns out that Heathrow has only docked BA just under 0.7 of a Fly Quiet point for every place lost across the seven parameters measured (adjusted by the appropriate "weighting"). That would imply, were BA to be the worst-performing airline (i.e. in 50th place) for every parameter, that instead of the zero points that the rules stipulate, it would still be awarded a score of 809 out of 1,000 !
Clearly, Heathrow couldn't find anyone with GCSE Maths in this summer's batch of interns ...
