Revealed: Airline where cancellations are 12 times more likely than on Ryanair

Flights from Gatwick are more likely to have been cancelled so far this year than at any other major UK airport.

The rate is 10 times worse than Stansted, the best-performing British hub.

More than 3% of planned flights from Gatwick didn't take place, compared with 0.3% of those from Stansted, according to figures from air travel intelligence company OAG provided exclusively to Sky News.

June was Gatwick's worst month this year - one in every 14 flights from the airport was cancelled.

The data is supplied to OAG from airlines, government agencies and other sources, and a cancellation is defined as any flight that an airline published to operate and was not cancelled at least 48 hours before departure.

A Gatwick Airport spokesperson said it regrets any cancellations and disruption to passengers - and explained it is going to carefully increase capacity over the coming months "so that airlines fly more reliable flight programmes and passengers experience a better standard of service".

It said this would help both airlines and ground handling companies, which are employed by airlines, in reducing the number of flights they need to manage.

Which airlines have cancelled most flights?

Ryanair was the best-performing major airline worldwide - it has cancelled just 0.3% of flights so far this year.

Michael O'Leary, CEO of the budget carrier, has said that his company saw the recovery coming and got staff back early, and pointed out that as they were based in Ireland they were still able to benefit from frictionless European labour where this became more difficult for UK-based airlines following Brexit.

British Airways is the worst-performing UK airline. At 3.5%, you are over 12 times more likely to have had a BA flight cancelled than a Ryanair one if you were expecting to fly in the first six months of 2022.

This data covers flights up to 10 July and doesn't include the further 10,300 cancellations announced by the company, affecting flights due to take off before the end of October.

Globally, China Eastern, based out of Shanghai, has been by far the worst affected, a product of the severe lockdown in the city from March onwards.

A BA spokesperson attributed some of the problems to major storms in February, when one in seven of its flights was cancelled in a week-long period, the peak for the year. It also suffered an IT fault at the end of March, which coincided with one-tenth of flights being cancelled at short notice.

The airline also highlighted increased exposure to global factors such as the Russian war in Ukraine and continuing COVID restrictions in Asia, compared with the likes of easyJet and Ryanair who only fly within Europe.

The figures show that, during the peak of the pandemic in 2020, easyJet was the worst-affected global airline.

It cancelled more than 50% of its 200,000 scheduled flights that year, and more than 99% of all flights that were meant to take off in April 2020.

A spokesperson from the company said "the UK government had the most onerous and long running travel restrictions in Europe and, as the UK's largest airline, we were disproportionately affected." When there were fewer restrictions they said they were able to matched capacity very accurately to demand.

-sky news