Methodology

What the published figures mean, what can be compared, and what they cannot prove.

Data sources

The historical and operational statistics here come from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE), the Australian Government's transport statistics agency. Domestic city-pair passenger history begins in January 1984, international city-pair passenger history in January 1985, and punctuality history in November 2003. The regional series uses financial years; the current published period runs from 1985-86 to 2025-26.

Where noted on a page, route pages also use a commercial schedule feed for enrichment that BITRE does not publish: flight numbers, observed aircraft types, scheduled operating days, and scheduled flight times or durations. Schedule enrichment does not supply BITRE passenger history, cancellation rates, on-time rates, or authority over route membership.

Reliability: cancellations and on-time performance

Cancellation rate is cancelled flights divided by scheduled flights. On-time rate is on-time movements divided by flights actually flown, following BITRE's definition. A cancelled flight is not counted as late.

Twelve-month figures are weighted by flight volume, not a simple average of monthly percentages. The national comparison (2.0% cancelled over the 12 months to Aug 2026) uses BITRE's published national total, rather than adding up the subset of route rows shown on this site.

Route passenger figures

Domestic routes

A domestic route page has a directional URL, so its schedule and reliability context can describe one direction. Its passenger-history figures describe the city pair / route pair in the published source; they are not a count of passengers travelling in only one direction.

International routes

Current route cards can describe one direction. International historical passenger milestones use the city-pair passenger series with both directions combined. Thus a page titled “Sydney to Auckland” can show an annual historical total larger than the current one-direction value.

A BITRE city pair is not necessarily a nonstop sector. A published city pair or flight-number relationship can include an intermediate stop, so a city pair should not automatically be read as a former or current nonstop route.

Airports and annual rankings

Airport passenger movements are airport-level statistics. They are not the same measure as route passenger figures and should not be reconstructed by summing the route pages.

Each annual airport rank compares airports with a valid observation in that particular year. The comparison set can therefore change over time: read a move from rank #X to rank #Y together with that year's denominator. A reported zero is an observation; a missing observation is not automatically treated as zero.

Airlines and destinations

Domestic airline reliability follows BITRE's published operating entities. Related operating brands such as Qantas and QantasLink, or Virgin Australia and Virgin Australia Regional Airlines, may be shown separately rather than merged into one company-wide rate.

International airline and destination history describes published passenger records involving Australia. Labels such as first recorded in the published series, last recorded passenger traffic and peak complete year describe those records; they are not proof of an exact first flight, service launch, or exact last operational date.

Passenger-record status

A recent positive passenger record means a recent positive observation in the published series. It does not necessarily mean that a scheduled service is operating today: a passenger-record state is not a live operational-status feed.

How the lost-route record is defined

The lost-route record uses the comparable international city-pair passenger series from January 2003 onward. A retained city pair must have at least one positive passenger month in that series, and its last positive passenger month must be strictly more than 12 months before the latest published positive passenger period. Freight or mail records do not advance the passenger cutoff.

“No post-2003 passenger record” means no positive passenger observation in the comparable post-2003 series; it is not a claim that every such city pair is merely a pre-2003 route. Partial years are not annualised, and missing months are not interpolated.

Regional aviation

Regional categories classify routes and sectors under the source's definitions; they are not permanent labels attached to airports. Regional passenger trips use the source's Traffic On Board definition and are not directly interchangeable with route-page passenger totals.

Operator and route counts are subject to the source's reporting coverage. Historical non-reporting by smaller operators can affect those counts, so a long-run decline should not automatically be described entirely as route closures. Counts across categories can also overlap and are not necessarily additive.

Schedule information

Schedule enrichment is a timetable snapshot for the observation period shown on the page. It can show current flight numbers, observed operating days, scheduled departure and arrival times, scheduled duration, and observed aircraft types. These observations do not by themselves prove long-run frequency, a permanently typical aircraft, current passenger traffic, historical route membership, on-time performance, cancellation rate, or the status of a specific future flight. They are not real-time tracking.

What these data cannot tell you

• Route-specific airfares. BITRE's fare index is national and samples the cheapest available fare on one day a month, not what each passenger paid.
• Why a flight was cancelled. Weather, crew, engineering and commercial decisions are not distinguished.
• The status of a specific future flight. Historical aggregates and timetable observations are not a live flight-status feed.
• Delay length. BITRE records whether a movement was on time, not by how much it missed.

Corrections and revisions

BITRE revises its own figures; when it does, FlightUnpacked can change with it. Schedule observations can also change when the published timetable snapshot changes. If a number looks wrong, check the official source and tell us.

Attribution and independence

BITRE data are reused under CC BY 4.0. This site is not affiliated with BITRE, the Australian Government, any airline, or any commercial data provider.