AVV Delays [In Processing - 2+ hours common]

[Quickstatus]

Recently some friends flew D7 218 KUL-AVV

Now AVV is not considered a busy airport by any metric nor is it a mega hub.

However the time it took from aircraft door to car was 2hr 50 min.

No specific reasons such as missing luggage, immigration or quarantine/custom issues. It just took that long to get out of the airport.

D7 is the only international airline that operates into AVV which may explain the long processing time - I wonder how Immigration, customs and quarantine schedule their personnel shifts. There are 2x D7 rotations. One morning rotation and another 12 hrs later.

Note the D7 aircraft only remains at AVV for about 1 hour, so immigration staff will need to be positioned at arrivals and departures at the same time.

Then they went to stay at Glen Waverley which is east of Melbourne

 

[docjames]

Wow, that's hopeless.

First report i've seen - there must have been more to that (?sick leave / unreplaced staff in C+I perhaps)?

Did your friends describe which bit was particularly slow?

 

[Melburnian1]

I didn't read it but a couple of weeks ago 'Geelong Advertiser' (News Ltd) had a report about long lines at customs. As Quickstatus implies, two flights a day with short turnarounds not only lack economies of scale for Australian Border Force but it cannot use the same staff for ingress and egress.

'The Advertiser' articles have also boasted at some stage that thousands of passengers had already used the D7 flights.

Even at CNS last year off a flight with fewer than 120 passengers, customs was slow (but better than described above).

 

[dajop]

Given the turnaround is 1:15 and I my experience most departing passengers arrive at airports well before the cutoff time, one suspects most departing passengers would have passed through immigration before the aircraft arrives, leaving most officers free to move to inbound processing once plane arrives. Unless of course not enough to begin with thus “all hands on deck” are needed to process outbound in time for departure.

If the flight was early could cause particular problems with rostering.

 

[Quickstatus]

Friends say that they say 6 immigration officers at arrival. Departure was quicker. No info about number of officers at departure

...

Given the turnaround is 1:15 and I my experience most departing passengers arrive at airports well before the cutoff time, one suspects most departing passengers would have passed through immigration before the aircraft arrives, leaving most officers free to move to inbound processing once plane arrives. Unless of course not enough to begin with thus “all hands on deck” are needed to process outbound in time for departure.

If the flight was early could cause particular problems with rostering.

Thanks @dajop
Checkin closes 60 minutes prior to departure, but most of the passengers would already have been processed through immigration and security. As the final departing passengers are processed, the immigration and security personnel would gradually shift to arrivals mode.

As the ground time of the aircraft is 1:15, the arriving aircraft would be at the gate 15 minutes before checkin closes and potentially arriving passengers would begin queuing at immigration while some immigration officers are still processing the final departing passengers.

Maybe this is a reason for the long delays at a quiet airport

 

[Saab34]

The ground operator is Swissport, which was recently named Aerocare and are a low cost low infrastructure operator.

They also have the Tiger contract and I’m not sure if they do this with D7 also, but due to tight staffing control at non hubs they unload the inbound baggage, load the outbound, then take the inbound to the belt. Another reason why I would never fly Tiger let alone with luggage.

 

[Mr H]

We arrived on D7 216 on 20 April and were out of the terminal in under an hour. The main logjam was the arrival of luggage.