Bad weather saw a third of UK flights delayed in late 2010
29.03.11
Flight punctuality at UK airports in the last three months of 2010 was severely hit by the bad weather, figures from the CAA have shown. More than a third of charter flights were delayed in the October - December 2010 period, whilst 32% of scheduled flights were delayed.
Scheduled flight punctuality at Luton Airport dropped to 64% compared with 76% in the same period in 2009. At Heathrow, where the pre-Christmas snow led to travel chaos with the airport closed for four days, punctuality figure fell by 10 percentage points to 65%.
Overall, 68% of scheduled flights at the 10 airports monitored by the CAA were on time (leaving or arriving up to 15 minutes late), compared with 77% in the same period of 2009. On-time charter flights at the airports fell from 71% in2009 to 63% in 2010. The average scheduled flight delays rose from 15 minutes in 2009 to 21 minutes in 2010, while the average charter delay increased from 24 minutes to 38 minutes.
Among the 75 destinations with the most passengers, scheduled flights to and from Madrid recorded the worst on-time performance (51%) and had the highest average delay (32 minutes). Flights to and from Guernsey had the highest on-time performance (82%), and flights to and from Billund in Denmark had the shortest average delay (14 minutes).
A CAA spokesman 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 does not explain it all.’
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