Passengers flying from UK airports frequently encounter longer and more flight delays, according to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). Official figures show that at Heathrow Airport’s 27 per cent scheduled flights were delayed in April to June this year, which calculates to more than one in four scheduled flights. This was the highest number among all airports in UK. Almost half of all flights to Toronto were delayed more than on any other route, and the highest average wait recorded was 28 minutes.
Among the ten airports monitored, the average delay increased by one minute to 12 minutes, and only 78 per cent of scheduled flights were on time, four percentage points lower than that in the same quarter last year. Punctuality on charter flights improved year on year, compared to scheduled flights, the average delay on charter flights was considerably longer at 17 minutes. CAA recorded the punctuality of 350,000 scheduled and 20,000 charter passenger flights, which represented a 0.8 per cent increase in scheduled services and a 12.8 per cent decrease in charter flights, compared with 2011.
The on-time performance for scheduled flights across all London airports fell by four percentage points to 77 per cent and the average delay increased by two to 13 minutes. Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and London City suffered worse flight delays than in 2011, but Luton improved its on-time performance by one percentage point.
At other airports monitored, the on-time performance for scheduled flights fell overall by two percentage points, and the average delay increased by one minute in the second quarter of 2012, compared with last year. On-time performance fell by three percentage points at Manchester and Birmingham, by two percentage points at Glasgow, by one percentage point at Edinburgh, but increased by one percentage point at Newcastle.