While domestic aviation recovers, it is important to make an effort to reduce the rate of delays and cancellations. (Photo: VNA) Dinh Viet Thang, the civil aviation authority’s director, saidthat the domestic aviation market was recovering at a pace that beat everyforecast, citing statistics that domestic visitors through airports in Juneincreased by 38% against the same period in 2019 before COVID broke out.
However, the number of delayed and cancelled flights has increasedsignificantly, especially at Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat international airports,as the aviation infrastructure remains undeveloped, he said.
“We cannot wait until the infrastructure system improves to reduce the rates ofdelays and cancellations,” Thang said.
He pointed out that Noi Bai T3 Terminal was expected to go operational in July2024 at the earliest and Long Thanh Airport in the second or third quarter of2025, while Tan Son Nhat Airport would not be upgraded until Long Thanh was putinto operation.
“What’s important is to find new ways to solve the problems, including theapplication of technology to reduce the number of delays and cancellations andensure travel demand,” Thang said.
Affirming that there was much work to do, Thang said that it was important tohave the determination to improve the situation, adding that if each stage wasshortened and operation capacity improved, the airport would have bettertraffic, meaning delays and cancellations would decrease.
After surveying Tan Son Nhat Airport, Deputy Director of the Civil AviationAuthority Ho Minh Tan said that the flight delays at Tan Son Nhat Airport werequite severe in June. There were several reasons for the delays andcancellations.
Besides the overloaded infrastructure or bad weather, the arrangement ofaeroplanes in the parking lots was not reasonable, not considering theaircraft's departure time.
According to Nguyen Quy Don, deputy director of the Southern Flight ManagementCorporation, pilots must strictly follow the time they are allowed to occupythe runway. Every second saved from the time of runway occupation means a lotto flight operation.
Sharing the same viewpoint, Bui Thanh Ha from the Vietnam Flight ManagementCorporation said that in a recent survey at Tan Son Nhat Airport, whenSingapore’s B777-300 aeroplane landed, it took the pilot only 60 seconds to getoff the runway while the Vietnamese pilot took nearly 70 seconds.
Deputy Director General of Vietnam Airlines Trinh Hong Quang said that nocarriers wanted its flights to be delayed or cancelled. However, the market wasgrowing too fast beyond every forecast, and carriers could not keep up.
Quang said that the carrier would cooperate with relevant management agenciesto improve services and reduce the rates of delays and cancellations.
According to Thang, when the number of passengers on the plane increased, theinfrastructure was limited, and congestion and flight delays were unavoidable.
It would be hard for passengers to accept that the flight, which took only 45minutes from departure to arrival, was delayed for hours.
If there were no improvements, the number of flights must be reduced, Thangsaid, adding that even the UK had to cancel hundreds of thousands of flightsrecently.
He asked the Vietnam Flight Management Corporation and the Airports Corporationof Vietnam to coordinate to discuss the operation rules for parking and beflexible in accordance with flight times.
It is also necessary to regulate the time for occupying the runways of specificairports, especially Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat airports, which were overcrowded,he said.
More than 5,600 flights of domestic airlines were delayed in June, accountingfor more than 18% of the total number of flights and nearly 16% higher than thesame period of 2021 and 9.4% higher than May.
Sixty-five flights were cancelled last month or 0.2% of the total number offlights.
The most common reason for the delay was a late return of an aeroplane.
According to the International Air Transport Association, Vietnam is among thecountries with the fastest recovering domestic aviation market./.
VNA
