Travellers at Gatwick suffered more delays than at any other major airport during the summer.

Figures compiled by the Civil Aviation Authority show that during the peak period between July and September only 61 per cent of holiday charter flights were on time.

The number of on-time scheduled flights fell to 59 per cent during the same period.

The CAA looked at punctuality at ten British airports: Gatwick, Heathrow, Birmingham, Luton, Stansted, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow and London City.

Delays for charter flights were the worst since September 11, 2001, at all ten airports.

Gatwick had the worst punctuality record and Luton had the best, with 77 per cent of charter flights on time.

The average delay was 34 minutes for charter passengers and 22 minutes for scheduled passengers.

Bosses are looking at ways punctuality can be improved by this summer, Gatwick's busiest time of year.

A spokeswoman for Gatwick's owner and operator, the British Airports Authority, said: "These are disappointing results for us and for our passengers who experienced the delays.

"The summer is our busiest time and we had 10.5 million passengers passing through the airport between July and September, up from 10.3 million in 2004.

"It is something that we are all going to have to look at, the airlines, ground crews and air traffic service."

Brendon Sewill, chairman of the Gatwick Airport Conservation Campaign, said the statistics showed the airport was struggling to cope with the number of passengers it had now.

Gatwick is the only single-runway major airport in the world.

He said BAA's plans to increase the number of passengers from 32 million to 45 million by 2015 would lead to even more delays.

He said: "People always groan about the punctuality of railways but these days they are more punctual than airlines, and far less damaging in terms of contributing to climate change and greenhouse gases.

"They will obviously struggle if they go ahead with plans to increase capacity."

Among the top 75 scheduled and charter destinations, the scheduled routes to Nice, New York JFK, Rome Fiumicino, Athens, Larnaca, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and Budapest all had on-time performances below 60 per cent last summer.

The scheduled destinations with the delays of 22 minutes or more last summer were Toronto, New York JFK, Athens, Nice, Rome Fiumicino and Larnaca. Corfu had the lowest on-time performance, at 60 per cent.

Thursday, January 5, 2005