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 2% increase on May’s traffic and an increase of 1.7% on June last year.

Eurocontrol figures show that NATS handled 23.8% of Europe’s traffic in June but was accountable for only 4% of Europe’s overall delay. 96.4% of flights received no NATS-attributable delay; for the 3.6% 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 delay due to weather. 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% 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% 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.”