March air traffic figures follow growth trend

In March, NATS handled 197,631 flights in UK airspace, an increase of just under 2% compared to March 2018.

There was significant growth in many areas of the operation, in particular in transatlantic and overflying traffic. There was also growth at all of the ’big five’ London Airports.

NATS handled almost a quarter of all the traffic in Europe in March and the levels of delay in UK airspace were very low. 99.9% of the flights had no NATS attributable delay while a total of 61 flights incurred an air traffic control delay. Across all 197,631 flights handled in March, the average delay per flight was 0.2 seconds.

Juliet Kennedy, NATS Operations Director, said: “The first quarter of 2019 has been a busy one for air traffic and this trend looks set to continue. We work hard alongside the airports and airlines to ensure passengers get safely on their way as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is especially important now as more people are flying than ever before and our airspace is getting increasingly busy and congested.”