The wild winter weather in December saw nearly a third of all flights in the final quarter of 2010 experience some sort of delay.
The charter flights to northerly airports of Edinburgh and Manchester experienced the most and longest delays to their schedules, while the Channel Island airports of Guernsey and Jersey fared the best.
The 32 per cent of flights that were delayed at the airports monitored in the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) figures was a significant rise from the 24 per cent suffering delays in the same period in 2009. The length of delay also rose to 21 minutes.
The CAA’s Director for Regulatory Policy, Iain Osborne, said, “While some of the fall in punctuality can be explained by the terrible weather in November and December, that doesn’t explain it all. The CAA website contains a guide for passengers to use to check which airline has the best punctuality on their chosen route.”
The figures monitored the delays affecting flights to and from Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, London City, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Guernsey Airport saw registered an 82 per cent on-time performance rating, while flights to and from the Danish airport of Billund had the shortest average delay, of just 14 minutes.
