Delays to scheduled flights at major UK airports rose this spring compared with the same period last year, while passengers on charter services enjoyed improved punctuality, say official figures released today.
The percentage of scheduled flights flying in and out of 10 UK airports on time between April and June was 72% compared with 75% during the same period last year, according to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).
Punctuality improved at Birmingham and Edinburgh airports but was as much as 13 per cent down at Luton and 11 per cent down at Stansted. The average scheduled service delay increased from 13 minutes in spring 2005 to 15 minutes in spring 2006.
In contrast, the proportion of on-time charter flights increased from 68% in spring 2005 to 69% in spring 2006, with the average delay falling from 26 minutes to 24 minutes.
The CAA statistics covered Heathrow, Gatwick, Birmingham, Luton, Stansted, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London City airports, and included arrivals and departures.
Among the top 75 scheduled and charter destinations, the scheduled routes to Nice, New York (Kennedy airport), Athens, New York (Newark) and Mumbai (Bombay) had on-time performances of less than 60%.
Among the charter destinations, Tenerife (Sur Reina) had both the highest on-time performance (74%) and the lowest average delay (19 minutes).
Meanwhile UK air traffic controllers announced yesterday that they had broken their record for the most flights handled in one day. The 24-hour record was reached by National Air Traffic Services (Nats) on September 1 when controllers handled 7,864 flights. Nats handled 217,930 flights in September 2006 - an increase of 3.3% on the same month last year.
Non-transatlantic overflights (flights handled by UK controllers but which do not touch down in the UK) continued to show strong growth in September - increasing by 16.7%. Flights between Ireland and Italy, Germany, France and Spain showed the greatest increases.
The domestic market also showed a 0.2% increase in September.
