Busiest day for UK airspace

The record for the busiest ever day in UK airspace fell last month and could be about to be surpassed again, according to the NATS air traffic control service last week, with the number of flights across the country continuing to increase.

The service says it handled 252,173 flights in UK airspace in July, an increase of 0.9% on the same month last year. Growth was seen especially in non-transatlantic international overflying traffic and transatlantic overflights, increasing by 6.5% and 5% respectively.

Traffic grew at seven of the 13 airports where NATS provides the air traffic control service, including three of the big five London facilities – Heathrow, Luton and London City.

NATS said it handled almost 24% of Europe’s traffic in July, maintaining high levels of punctuality. Across all 252,173 flights handled during the month, 98% had no NATS-attributable delay. Year to date, the average air traffic control delay per flight is 7sec.

NATS operations director Juliet Kennedy said: “Last month we recorded our busiest-ever day, with 8,863 flights handled by controllers on 5 July. We are now regularly managing more than 8,000 flights a day so that’s not to say this record won’t be broken again over the summer.”

www.nats.aero

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mike carrivick, Wokingham

Congrats to NATS! We take all this for granted, but without the systems they've developed and trained for over recent times, none one of this would be possible.