Bad weather and technical problems at the NATS air traffic centre had a major impact on the UK’s average flight delays in December.
Hundreds of thousands of passengers were hit by cancellations and major delays after a technical glitch caused the internal phone system to fail at the Swanwick centre on December 7.
According to the latest figures from the traffic control agency, this meant NATS attributable delays caused an increase in average delay of 89.3 minutes in December, per delayed flight, compared to 20.1 minutes in December 2012.
But NATS was quick to point out that the overall NATS average delay for the UK for 2013 was around five seconds per flight, while the European average performance was around 25 seconds delay per flight.
Across the whole calendar year, UK air traffic rose slightly to 2,153,995 flights in total, a rise of 0.4%.
Figures are still well below numbers in 2007, when air traffic was almost 13% higher.
In December, NATS handled a total of 152,340 flights, a rise of 2.1% compared to the traffic handled in December 2012.
