Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

How did airlines fare this year?

"It was bloody convenient," says David Radcliffe, boss of Hogg Robinson. "Because it was only three-and-a-half hours, it didn't take as much out of you as a subsonic transatlantic flight." No prizes for guessing which travel icon failed to make it to the end of 2003. Concorde checked out in October, and the supersonic era is prematurely over. So people hoping to be home for the festive season no longer have the fast-track option if, for example, the captain of their 747 decides to take a drink before taking the controls.

The people who arrived from Washington a day late at Heathrow last weekend must have wished the time machine was still in service. It is difficult to imagine a more disruptive occasion for Virgin Atlantic flight 22 to be grounded than the last Friday before Christmas. Every other London-bound plane that night had either left the US capital, or was full, or both. Like most airlines, Virgin does not keep flight crews on standby in every city it serves in case one of its captains is indisposed. Strict rules on pilots' hours of duty make it impossible instantly to bring on a substitute. Weddings, birthday parties and connections were missed when the official seven-hour flight time extended to 27 hours.

Virgin Atlantic's response to this incident differed sharply from British Airways' reaction to the wildcat strikes at Heathrow in the summer. Virgin's chief executive, Steve Ridgway, was at Terminal 3 to meet the 383 passengers who, he said "were tired, fed-up and angry - and I don't blame them". Each one was handed a letter from the Virgin chairman, Sir Richard Branson, asking them to e-mail him direct, and promising them a free round-trip to anywhere his airline flies. (If you are a beneficiary of this largesse, the most value you can squeeze out of the offer is a flight to Tokyo - unless you wait a while in the hope that Virgin starts flying to Australia.)

Textbook PR; but the cost of the episode to Virgin Atlantic is immense. Let's start with the small change. A day's delay for a fully-laden 747 makes an immediate £100,000 hole in an airline balance sheet. Virgin has to pay for hotel accommodation for 400 people, airport fees, and claims from passengers for out-of-pocket expenses; the actress Victoria Pritchard, who was on the plane, was charged $85 (£50) for three brief calls home from the Sheraton Hotel. The compensatory flights will cost half a million pounds if everyone plays the system to its maximum.

The longer-term damage is less certain. Virgin Atlantic has enjoyed an almost flawless 20 years of existence, but the airline's reputation for operational robustness and inflight excellence could be jeopardised if passengers worry that the Virgin Mary (tomato juice, celery, etc) is not the drink of choice for every Virgin pilot before trying anything tricky like flying a plane.

LOTS OF the flights I took in 2003 were late, though none to the extent of previous years (24 unexpected hours in Santo Domingo courtesy of Britannia, three days in the limbo of the Toronto airport Holiday Inn thanks to Air Transat, etc). My final flight of the year summed up the more mundane stresses of travel. All the passengers were aboard the British Airways jet at Helsinki and strapped in with five minutes to go before departure, and all the crew were sober, when the captain announced an hour delay because of air-traffic control congestion at Heathrow.

No one was allowed off to make phone calls or stretch legs, as the captain tried to negotiate an improved slot. At one point he said he had. The promised time came and, unlike us, went.

Approaching Heathrow, the Airbus went into the usual merry-go-around over the Home Counties. On the ground, two hours after we were supposed to arrive, I discovered that my baggage was enjoying a final Finnish fling; it caught up with me the following night.

Both BA and Virgin Atlantic may be relieved to learn that they performed moderately well in this column's annual analysis of flight delays. The survey sample is as random as can be: the 89 flights that I have taken this year. I was booked on a total of 102, but 13 got away without me. Of these, I missed eight deliberately. I had booked them with Ryanair as "options" - flights so cheap that, if it was raining in Spain or drizzling in Ireland on the day of departure, I simply stayed in bed and let Michael O'Leary pocket the taxes, fees and charges I had paid.

Three flights left without me because train links to the airports failed (Stansted Express 2, Thameslink 1), while a late arrival on easyJet thwarted a Ryanair departure. The remaining flight was missed through my ineptitude: showing up at the boarding gate in Denver only 10 minutes before departure. This particular United Airlines flight was something of a rarity, because it got away on time; the average delay on the eight United flights I managed to catch was 18 minutes. British Airways was one minute less tardy on the nine flights I took. Among other airlines on which I took at least four flights, the worst average delay was Kuwait Airways (45 minutes late); best performance by far was Air New Zealand, averaging 17 minutes early.

Among full-service carriers I used less frequently, Ukraine International performed best at 20 minutes early on both flights. At the other end of the spectrum, Lufthansa and Emirates straggled in an average 15 minutes late while SriLankan mislaid half an hour of my life on each flight I took; its flight code is UL, which wags suggest stands for Usually Late. Air Berlin (12 minutes late on average) and Air Europa (an hour late) occupy the fuzzy middle ground between traditional and low-cost airlines.

The best-performing no-frills airline was Basiq Air, which was regularly five minutes early on its shuttles between Stansted and Amsterdam. Charters were mixed; Britannia averaged 10 minutes early, while Thomas Cook Airlines was a consistent 40 minutes late.

The ideal airport is Ostend. To see if its remarkable average of 32 minutes early is just a fluke, act quickly; Ryanair cancels services to the Belgian city on 14 January. The tardiest one-off performance was aboard no-frills Jet2, which was 70 minutes late on the single flight I took from Leeds/Bradford to Amsterdam. To make matters worse, it was the airline's inaugural departure on a foggy 12 February. The best and worst timekeeping was on one airline, Ryanair; one flight from Ostend was 35 minutes early, while my only trip to Hahn ("Frankfurt") was 80 minutes late. But if, flying an average of once every four days, that is the worst that happens, and par for the course is a delay of only 11 minutes, this is a fine time to be a traveller - so long as you don't mind slumming it in subsonic, and your pilot doesn't mind doing without a drink.