Brisbane Airport board holds key to delays TODAY these people have the power to start restoring confidence in Brisbane Airport's ability to meet the needs of travellers and the state's economy. Persistent flight delays and a question mark hanging over the proposed new parallel runway will be on the agenda when the directors of the besieged Brisbane Airport Corporation sit down for their monthly board meeting this morning. The Courier-Mail's Brisbane Late Again campaign calling on BAC to address the problems has drawn a huge response from Queenslanders. Today BAC chairman Bill Grant, managing director Julieanne Alroe and their seven co-directors have the chance to end the uncertainty by giving a guarantee that the desperately needed new infrastructure will be ready - on target - by 2020. Despite talking about the need for the parallel runway to cope with demand and including it in successive masterplans, BAC failed to set a start date for 15 years and did not develop a clear funding model. Facing the risk of environmental approvals expiring, they finally started preliminary work on land clearing and drainage last September but are now threatening to halt construction when that first phase finishes by mid-2013. BAC says work on the second stage - dredging up to 13 million cubic metres of sand from Moreton Bay and pumping it on to the site - will not start unless airlines agree to foot a quarter of the $1.3 billion cost through advance increases to per-passenger landing charges over the eight-year construction period. The airlines refuse to force their customers to pay for a runway they can not land on for nearly a decade. BAC says its shareholders - mostly Australian superannuation and managed funds - expect a reasonable return on their investment in infrastructure and the certainty of revenue flow while the 3.3km runway and 12km of taxiways are built. The airport's owners say negotiations with the airlines are continuing, with hope of a resolution by year's end. Airline sources, however, say talks have broken down and the topic of funding the runway has been dropped from regular discussions between parties. Options open to the board today include: Deciding to pay the full cost of the parallel runway themselves through equity and debt-raising. Referring the dispute to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for a non-binding opinion on whether the airlines should contribute in advance towards the new runway. Seeking a binding declaration from the ACCC on the issue. Doing nothing, and hope the airlines change their minds. BAC must start the second stage of work this year if the runway is to be finished by 2020. THE re-opening of Brisbane Airport's cross-runway has failed to significantly improve peak-hour delays, with nearly 50 per cent of flights late. Analysis of the airport's website flight times by The Courier-Mail reveals that 43 per cent of planes have been delayed by more than 15 minutes since the cross-runway came back into use on March 15. The best on-time performance was on March 25, when only 12 per cent of flights were late in the busy 5-8pm period. However, travellers this week experienced some of the worst delays since the cross-runway re-opened, with two-thirds of flights arriving late, including 18 that were more than 45 minutes behind schedule on Wednesday. Despite assurances from the Brisbane Airport Corporation that the re-opening would ease flight congestion, the figures showed that passengers on mid-week flights continued to be plagued by extensive delays. The average wait into Brisbane Airport was 35 minutes. Wednesdays were worst overall with 54 per cent of planes landing late on average, compared with 21 per cent on Thursdays. Regional routes performed slightly worse than their big city counterparts, with 45 per cent of these flights into Brisbane Airport delayed. Forty per cent of aircraft arriving from other capital cities were late. Passengers from Biloela were hardest hit, with eight out of nine flights delayed in the past three weeks. Of the metro airports, Sydney flights performed the worst with 54 per cent experiencing delays. Meanwhile, every flight from Adelaide was on schedule. However, the figures for flights outside the three-hour evening peaks were better. Data for full days from the Flightstats.com website, which monitors hundreds of airports worldwide, reveal three-quarters of aircraft were on-time since March 15. Jacinda Tutty, Felicity Sheppard