NATS records its busiest day since the pandemic

NATS, the UK’s major provider of air traffic services, last month recorded its busiest day since 2019 with 8,238 movements on Monday 15 July. It is the clearest sign yet that air traffic is almost back to pre-pandemic levels.

UK air traffic increased by 3.3 per cent in July over the same month last year, with 242,229 movements in UK airspace. For the month, traffic was just four per cent lower than in July 2019.

Non-transatlantic air traffic showed strongest growth as peak holiday season arrived. The strongest growth in July was in routes to Turkey (19 per cent) and the Canary Islands (11 per cent), although the busiest destinations were still Spain, Italy and France. Slowest growth in the month was in transatlantic traffic.

NATS handled almost 24 per cent of European traffic in July, according to Eurocontrol, with only 1.5 per cent of overall European delay attributed to NATS (excluding weather). 97 per cent of UK flights experienced no NATS-attributable delay; the average delay per delayed flight was 15 minutes.

Kathryn Leahy, Chief Operations Officer, said: “July was a really busy month with the Olympics starting in Paris and, just before that, the global IT outage which affected many airlines and airports for some days.

“Our team pulled out all the stops to support them as they dealt with both these major events which inevitably had an impact on their schedules. We are now in the peak holiday season and expect air traffic to sustain the current levels throughout the next month.”

NATS made a short video from radar data showing how air traffic was rerouted to avoid the exclusion zone around Paris for the Olympics opening ceremony.