15 June 2009

Drop in flights helps punctuality at UK airports

Punctuality of flights from UK airports has improved as flight number fall.

According to the latest CAA figures, flight numbers declined by 9% and passengers handled fell by 11% in January to March, compared with the same months in 2008

This helped Heathrow improve punctuality by more than a third over the same period, and all 10 airports monitored improved their performance.

During January to March 2009, the overall on-time performance (defined as early to 15 minutes late) of scheduled flights at the 10 UK airports monitored by the CAA increased from 70% to 81%, compared with the same period in 2008.

At Heathrow, the average delay for scheduled flights was halved from 24 minutes to 12 minutes.

London City also halved its average delay to nine minutes in the latest quarter and achieved an on-time performance of 84%, up 18 percentage points on quarter 1 2008.

On-time performance at regional airports rose by nine percentage points and average delay fell by four minutes in the first three months of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008.

The greatest increases in on-time performance and decreases in average delay amongst the regional airports were seen at Edinburgh (12 percentage points and six minutes), Glasgow (10 percentage points and five minutes) and Manchester (eight percentage points and four minutes).

The proportion of on-time charter flights rose from 61% to 68%, while the average delay across all charter flights monitored fell from 29 minutes to 23 minutes.

Gatwick and Manchester, the monitored airports with the largest charter operations, saw average delays in the first three months of 2009 diminish since the same period in 2008 by five minutes to 25 minutes and by nine minutes to 22 minutes respectively.

On-time performance for charter services improved from 59% to 65% at Gatwick and from 57% to 68% at Manchester.

Among the 75 scheduled and charter destinations with the most passengers in the first quarter of 2009, flights to Rotterdam had the highest on-time performance (91%) and those to Luxembourg the shortest average delay (five minutes).

Tenerife was the only charter destination among the top 75 destinations for January to March 2009, and its services attained an on-time performance of 76% and an average delay of 18 minutes.

Flights to Istanbul recorded the worst on-time performance of 58% and those to Toronto had the highest average delay of 22 minutes.

By Bev Fearis