NATS handles 241,141 flights in June as weather disruption rises

NATS safely handled 241,141 flights in June as UK air traffic continued to build during the early summer travel period.

The figure represents a 2% increase on May and a 1.7% rise compared with June last year, according to the UK’s major provider of air traffic services.

NATS said it handled 23.8% of Europe’s traffic during the month while accounting for 4% of Europe’s overall delay. A total of 96.4% of flights received no NATS-attributable delay. For the 3.6% of flights that did experience NATS-attributable delay, the average delay was 13.7 minutes.

Weather disruption affects UK air traffic

NATS said June included a number of challenging days affected by weather disruption across the country.

These weather-related delays are not attributed to NATS, but the organisation said they were almost three times higher than in June last year.

The figures underline the operational pressure facing air traffic management during the peak summer period, when traffic levels increase and weather can quickly affect capacity, routing and airport operations.

Kathryn Leahy, chief operations officer at NATS, 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.”

Transatlantic overflights show the strongest growth

The strongest area of growth in June was transatlantic overflights, which increased by 5.8% year on year. NATS said the increase was supported by travel demand linked to football fans heading to the World Cup.

By contrast, non-transatlantic overflights recorded the weakest performance, falling by 1.1% year on year. NATS linked that decline to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, which continues to affect some international air traffic flows.

NATS is the UK’s principal air navigation services provider. Its regulated business, NATS En Route plc, provides air traffic management services within UK airspace and over the eastern part of the North Atlantic, while NATS Services Ltd provides air traffic control and related services at airports in the UK and overseas.

The organisation handled 2.5 million flights in the UK during the 2025/26 financial year.