Image courtesy NATS

The total was also nearly 11,000 higher than June’s total flights and averaged more than 8,000 flights per day. The busiest day so far this year – and the busiest day since 2019 – was Friday 18th July, when NATS handled 8,340 flights. The busiest day on record was 8,592 flights on 5th July 2019.

 
According to Eurocontrol, NATS handled 23.7% of Europe’s traffic in July and was accountable for 1.8%of Europe’s overall delay. A total of 98.25% of flights received no NATS-attributable delay and the average NATS delay per delayed flight was 22 minutes. However, this performance was overshadowed by more significant delays leading to flight cancellations on Wednesday 30th July caused by a technical issue with part of NATS’ radar service.  
 
The market segment with most growth was non-transatlantic overflights, which increased by 10.5% on last year, with particular growth in flights using UK airspace between Norway and Spain, Norway and the Netherlands and Germany and Ireland. The busiest UK routes were with Spain, Italy and France. Domestic UK flights, however, dropped by 4.7%.
 
Martin Rolfe, Chief Executive Officer, said: “July was particularly busy and our teams have done a magnificent job to get people away on their holidays as punctually as possible. We come to work every day wanting to do the very best we can and the delays on 30th July – caused by a radar technical issue which was quickly resolved – were a huge disappointment that we worked extremely hard with the airlines to recover and to minimise any ongoing disruption to their operations. We apologise to everyone who was affected by this issue.   
 
“The impacts as a result of the flight restrictions we had to put in place for safety reasons showed how little slack there is in our aviation system and how the entire industry depends on everything running without any hitches, every day.”