July saw busiest day since pandemic for UK flights

UK air traffic in July increased by 2.4 per cent on the same month last year as NATS, the UK’s major provider of air traffic services, safely handled 248,138 flights. The total was also nearly 11,000 higher than June’s total flights and averaged more than 8,000 flights per day.  The busiest day so far this year – and the busiest day since 2019 – was Friday 18 July, when NATS handled 8,340 flights.  The busiest day on record was 8,592 flights on 5 July 2019.

According to Eurocontrol, NATS handled 23.7 per cent of Europe’s traffic in July and was accountable for 1.8 per cent of Europe’s overall delay.  98.25 per cent of flights received no NATS-attributable delay; the average NATS delay per delayed flight was 22 minutes. However, this performance was overshadowed by more significant delays leading to flight cancellations on Wednesday 30 July caused by a technical issue with part of NATS’ radar service.  

The market segment with most growth was non-transatlantic overflights, which increased by 10.5 per cent on last year, with particular growth in flights using UK airspace between Norway and Spain, Norway and the Netherlands, and Germany and Ireland. The busiest UK routes were with Spain, Italy and France. Domestic UK flights, however, dropped by 4.7 per cent.

Martin Rolfe, Chief Executive Officer, said: “July was particularly busy and our teams have done a magnificent job to get people away on their holidays as punctually as possible.  We come to work every day wanting to do the very best we can and the delays on July 30 – caused by a radar technical issue which was quickly resolved  – were a huge disappointment that we worked extremely hard with the airlines to recover, and to minimise any ongoing disruption to their operations.  We apologise to everyone who was affected by this issue.   

“The impacts as a result of the flight restrictions we had to put in place for safety reasons showed how little slack there is in our aviation system and how the entire industry depends on everything running without any hitches, every day.”