Air travellers faced worse delays on average at UK airports in the first quarter of 2008 than they did in the same period last year, according to official figures. During January to March 2008, the overall number of scheduled flights arriving on-time - defined as early to 15 minutes late - at the 10 UK airports monitored by the CAA fell by 4 percentage points to 68 percent, statistics released today showed.
At Heathrow, 56 percent of flights were on time, a decline of 9 percentage points over the same period in 2007, as the airport was hit by the disastrous opening of the new Terminal 5. At London City, 58 percent of flights were on time, down 12 percentage points.
However, Luton, Gatwick, Stansted and Birmingham all improved their scheduled punctuality performance during the period. At Luton, on-time performance increased by 5 percentage points to 76 percent, at Gatwick by 4 percentage points to 72 percent, at Stansted by 2 percentage points to 80 percent, and at Birmingham by 1 percentage point to 78 percent.
The average delay across all the scheduled flights monitored rose to 18 minutes in 2008 from 16 minutes in the first quarter of 2007. Average delays decreased at Gatwick, Luton, Birmingham, Stansted and Manchester, but increased at Heathrow, London City, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The proportion of on-time charter flights fell by 3 percentage points to 62 percent, compared with the same period the year before. At all monitored airports, performance fell compared to the previous year, except for Stansted, where it increased by 2 percentage points, and Gatwick, where it remained the same.
The average delay across all charter flights monitored increased by 1 minute to 28 minutes in the first quarter of 2008. Stansted, Glasgow and Edinburgh all saw decreases in their average delay.
Among the 75 scheduled and charter destinations with the most passengers, the scheduled routes to Dubai, Istanbul and Helsinki had on-time performances of less than 50 percent. Dubai and Istanbul had average delays above 30 minutes.
Tenerife (Sur Reina) was the only charter destination among the top 75. It attained an on-time performance of 73 percent and an average delay of 19 minutes. Guernsey had the highest on-time performance (86 percent) and Shannon had the shortest average delay (9 minutes) amongst the top 75 destinations'. |
