Jake Nelson

The first flight from Shanghai Pudong, MU7389, touched down just after 10:30am on Friday aboard the 232-seat A330-200 B-8231. China Eastern will operate three non-stop return services per week, on Monday, Thursday and Saturday, until 18 February.

Last month saw 74.3 per cent of Rex services depart on time and 70.6 per cent arrive on time. In contrast, Qantas had 69.5 per cent on-time departures and 67.8 per cent on-time arrivals, with Virgin the worst of the three at 56.5 per cent on-time departures and 54 per cent on-time arrivals.

VH-VGJ (similar aircraft pictured), which was not carrying passengers, was being towed to gate 4 when the Mitsubishi Triton driven by an airport security contractor employee crashed into its right engine at approximately 5:30am, smashing the ute’s windscreen and trapping the driver until emergency services freed them.

Just 52.6 per cent of scheduled Bonza services took off on time last month, down from 73.3 per cent in November, while cancellations went from 4.2 per cent to 19.4 per cent. This was the worst performance on both metrics among all domestic and regional carriers for the month of December.

A total of 3.58 million passengers went through Sydney’s terminals last month – 15.8 per cent higher than December 2022, and 90.6 per cent of December 2019 levels – with Australian passport holders exceeding pre-pandemic numbers for the first time, up 1.3 per cent on December 2019.

The Flying Kangaroo pointed to new data that showed it was outperforming Virgin despite its on-time departures remaining far below the long-term average.