Weather makes its presence felt

Summer holidays are well under way as NATS, the UK’s major provider of air traffic services, safely handled 241,141 flights in June, a two per cent increase on May’s traffic and an increase of 1.7 per cent on June last year.

Eurocontrol figures show that NATS handled 23.8 per cent of Europe’s traffic in June but was accountable for only four per cent of Europe’s overall delay. 96.4 per cent of flights received no NATS-attributable delay; for the 3.6 per cent of flights which had a NATS-attributable delay, the average was 13.7 minutes. Across the country, there were a number of challenging days of delays due to weather – which are not attributable to NATS – almost three times higher than in June last year.

The market with most growth was transatlantic overflights which increased by 5.8 per cent year on year with many lucky football fans getting to the World Cup, while the market with least growth was non-transatlantic overflights which actually decreased by 1.1 per cent due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Kathryn Leahy, Chief Operations Officer, said: “We are now regularly seeing days with more than 8,000 flights in, out and over the UK so the workload is high for our controllers and they along with all our operational colleagues are doing an amazing job to get well earned summer holidays off to a good start.”