Could do better: CAA airport on-time report is in
Sunday, 29 Mar, 2011
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Almost a third of all scheduled flights at ten CAA-monitored UK airports were delayed in the last quarter of 2010.
According to figures released on Monday by the authority, some 32% departed more than 15 minutes after scheduled take-off – this compares with 24% in the same period in 2009.
Averagely, the flights actually took off 21 minutes later than they should have done. The statistics looked even worse for Heathrow individually, where 35% of flights were delayed between October and December.
The figures come in spite of the fact that there were actually less take-offs in the 2010 period than in the 2009 period.
There were 309,000 scheduled flights in the last quarter of 2010 across the ten monitored airports, 4% less than in 2009.
CAA group director for regulatory policy Iain Osborne said: “During the final three months of last year, nearly a third of flights were more than 15 minutes late. The worst performers were charter flights from Edinburgh and Manchester, with scheduled flights from Heathrow and Luton also performing badly.
“While some of the fall in punctuality can be explained by the terrible weather in November and December, that doesn’t explain it all. The CAA website contains a guide for passengers to use to check which airline has the best punctuality on their chosen route.”
When the CAA looked in detail at performance on days affected by bad weather, it discovered that about only one third of the reduction in on-time performance and about a quarter of the increase in average delay was due to weather-related issues.
Passengers from London and the south-east were most likely to be late if they were leaving from Luton or Heathrow. Luton’s on-time performance fell from 76% to 64% and Heathrow’s fell by ten percentage points to 65%. Average delay increased by eight minutes at Luton and by seven minutes at Heathrow.
Charter flight delays were none too impressive either. The number of those that were on-time fell by eight percentage points to 63%, compared with the same period of 2009.
The average delay across all charter flights monitored in the fourth quarter of 2010 was 38 minutes, compared to 24 minutes in the four quarter of 2009.
The CAA says those travelling to Madrid suffered most from delays.
Scheduled flights to and from the city showed a low 51% on-time performance and had average delays of 32 minutes.
On the plus side, if travellers were flying to or from Guernsey there was a much better chance of getting there punctually, with an 82% on-time performance rate. Flights to and from Billund in Denmark had the shortest average delay of 14 minutes.
by Dinah Hatch
Dinah
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