For journalists and researchers

UK flight disruption, day by day

We sweep arrivals at 20 airports across the UK and Jersey several times a day and keep every flight that landed 3 or more hours late or was cancelled. Unlike a live tracker, the record is dated and stays put, so a day can be looked up again weeks later. It starts in August 2026.

20 airports swept Updated three times a day Free to quote with credit

The record

Worst days on record

Ranked by flights that landed 3 or more hours late or were cancelled, at the airports we sweep. Where a day's cause has been stated on the record by the regulator or the airlines, it is named and sourced.

Date Flights Worst airports
8 September 2026 a NATS air traffic control failure 483 London Heathrow 120, London Gatwick 99, London Stansted 65, Manchester 44
9 September 2026 356 London Heathrow 177, Manchester 43, London Gatwick 40, London Stansted 19
28 August 2026 125 London Heathrow 23, London Stansted 17, Manchester 17, London City 14
27 August 2026 95 Manchester 29, London Heathrow 22, London Gatwick 10, London Luton 7
10 September 2026 86 London Heathrow 41, London Gatwick 12, London Stansted 6, Manchester 6
21 September 2026 a second NATS air traffic control failure, at Prestwick 65 Manchester 13, Edinburgh 11, London Heathrow 11, George Best Belfast City 7
29 August 2026 52 London Stansted 11, Manchester 10, Birmingham 9, London Heathrow 8
4 September 2026 45 London Gatwick 17, London Heathrow 8, Manchester 4, Birmingham 3
22 September 2026 44 London Heathrow 13, Manchester 12, London Stansted 6, London Gatwick 5
30 August 2026 44 London Gatwick 13, Manchester 9, Bristol 5, London Heathrow 3
23 September 2026 40 London Heathrow 15, London Stansted 7, Manchester 5, London Gatwick 4
3 September 2026 40 London Heathrow 20, Manchester 5, Birmingham 4, Aberdeen International 2

12 days shown, 1,475 flights between them. Every date links to the full per-flight list for that day.

Method

How the figures are produced

We poll an arrivals feed for each tracked airport three times a day and keep every arrival that was cancelled or landed 3 or more hours behind schedule. A flight is filed under the day it actually landed, not the day it was scheduled to, because that is the day the passenger spent in an airport. The stored record is never overwritten once the day closes.

What it does not cover

These are tracked-airport totals, not national ones, and they are arrivals only. We also sweep two US airports for flights arriving from the UK and EU; they are excluded from every figure on this page, because a bad day at Newark is US weather and would badly distort a UK count. A status feed can be corrected after the fact, and a delay or cancellation does not by itself mean compensation is owed — the cause decides that, and the cause is not in this data.

Airports covered

Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted, Luton, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, London City, Belfast International, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds Bradford, Belfast City, Aberdeen, East Midlands, Southampton, Jersey, Bournemouth.

Using it

How to cite this

These are our own figures, not the Civil Aviation Authority's. The punctuality statistics elsewhere on this site are CAA data and are credited as such on those pages; nothing on this page is. Quote any of it with a credit to CheckFlightCompensation and a link to this page, and say which date the figures were taken, because the current month keeps changing as flights land.

Every day on record, one row per airport per day, is in a CSV here. It covers more days than the table above, which only shows the worst.

Checking something against a specific flight or a specific day, or want a cut of the data that is not published here? Ask us and we will answer.