Flight punctuality at UK airports falls in second quarter of 2014

• 78% of scheduled flights on-time at UK airports in the second quarter (April to June) of 2014.
• On-time performance was three percentage points lower than same period in 2013.
• All 10 airports monitored saw reductions in flight punctuality.

Flight punctuality at UK airports fell in the second quarter of 2014 compared with the same period in 2013.

On-time performance of scheduled flights was 78%, which was three percentage points lower than the second quarter of 2013.

The five biggest London airports, Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City, saw an overall reduction of three percentage points for on-time scheduled flights, falling from 80% to 77%.

The five other UK airports monitored, Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle, have also seen an overall reduction of three percentage points, from 84% to 81% of flights on-time.

Individually all ten airports saw punctuality deteriorations. On-time performance falls for scheduled flights varied by airport, with the biggest fall being at Luton, where the decline was eight percentage points.

An ‘on-time’ flight is defined as departing or arriving at a UK airport either early or up to 15 minutes late. On average monitored scheduled flights were delayed by 12 minutes, which is an increase of one minute when compared to the second quarter of 2013.

The overall on-time performance for charter flights was 72%, which is a decrease of five percentage points compared with the second quarter of 2013. However, average delay was 18 minutes, the same as in the second quarter of 2013.

In the second quarter of 2014, 366,000 scheduled and 19,000 charter passenger flights at the ten airports were monitored for punctuality by the CAA. This represents a 2.9% increase in scheduled flights and a 7.3% fall in charter flights, when compared with the same quarter in 2013.

Destinations with most flights

The busiest 75 scheduled international destinations had between 1,000 and 13,000 flights to and from the 10 UK airports monitored in the second quarter of 2014.

Of those, Rotterdam recorded the highest on-time performance with 88.3% and Stavanger, Norway, had the lowest average delay of 6.9 minutes.

Flights to and from Toronto achieved the lowest on-time performance with 59.7% and the highest average delay of 25.5 minutes.