Following the setbacks the travel industry has faced over the last few years, it’s reassuring to see the number of UK airports experiencing a low number of cancellations during June and the encouraging statistics for early departures. Delays will inevitably sometimes happen; however, we hope by sharing an analysis of the CAA’s June punctuality report we can also demonstrate how reliable air transportation is, despite what some of the news headlines published in June might have you believe.
The full CAA table is available here and measures the flights departing from 26 of the UK’s major airports including Birmingham, Bristol, Gatwick, Heathrow and Manchester comparing the number of cancellations and percentage of early and late departures reported.
Of the four largest and busiest airports, Stansted Airport was found to have the least number of cancellations during June with 81 flights cancelled from a total of 14,171 departures compared to 637 flights cancelled from a total of 33,793 departures at Heathrow Airport. That’s a cancellation rate of less than 0.6% at Stansted and less than 2% at Heathrow. When looking at the smaller UK airports Bournemouth, Exeter and Teesside International all came out on top of the ‘departure board’ having no cancelled flights reported during the same month.
Comparing early (yes, early!) departures, East Midlands, Leeds Bradford and Exeter all topped the list reporting 6.92%, 5.83% and 5.06% of flights departing more than 15 minutes early respectively. Out of the 26 airports featured, seven airports ensured around one third of flights departed between 1 – 15 minutes early including Belfast City, Belfast International, East Midlands International, Exeter, Liverpool, Southampton and Teesside International Airports.
The table below shows selected data from the CAA dataset. Full data available here
| Airport | Number of Flights | Flights more than 15 minutes early (%) | Flights 15 minutes early to 1 minute early (%) | Flights Cancelled (%) |
| ABERDEEN | 2127 | 4.1 | 30.6 | 2.7 |
| BELFAST CITY (GEORGE BEST) | 1339 | 9.9 | 37.7 | 1.5 |
| BELFAST INTERNATIONAL | 2890 | 4.5 | 36.7 | 1.3 |
| BIRMINGHAM | 5354 | 4.6 | 20.6 | 0.5 |
| BOURNEMOUTH | 455 | 3.7 | 33.0 | 0.0 |
| BRISTOL | 4642 | 3.0 | 29.4 | 1.1 |
| CARDIFF WALES | 458 | 1.9 | 31.8 | 0.9 |
| DONCASTER SHEFFIELD | 499 | 4.2 | 18.4 | 0.0 |
| EAST MIDLANDS INTERNATIONAL | 1638 | 6.6 | 44.2 | 0.4 |
| EDINBURGH | 7274 | 4.1 | 27.3 | 1.6 |
| EXETER | 518 | 5.4 | 38.6 | 0.0 |
| GATWICK | 18534 | 8.2 | 28.4 | 0.6 |
| GLASGOW | 4616 | 4.9 | 37.3 | 2.0 |
| HEATHROW | 31792 | 7.1 | 27.0 | 1.6 |
| ISLE OF MAN | 670 | 6.4 | 38.7 | 2.2 |
| JERSEY | 1284 | 4.1 | 30.9 | 1.2 |
| LEEDS BRADFORD | 1890 | 7.9 | 29.9 | 0.3 |
| LIVERPOOL (JOHN LENNON) | 2306 | 3.4 | 39.6 | 0.9 |
| LONDON CITY | 3867 | 8.3 | 32.9 | 2.4 |
| LUTON | 7664 | 3.0 | 24.4 | 0.6 |
| MANCHESTER | 12355 | 4.6 | 20.9 | 0.9 |
| NEWCASTLE | 2504 | 5.6 | 24.8 | 0.6 |
| SOUTHAMPTON | 1233 | 2.9 | 29.2 | 4.4 |
| STANSTED | 13024 | 2.1 | 31.0 | 0.8 |
| TEESSIDE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT | 370 | 7.6 | 43.5 | 0.0 |