According to new data, the cancellation rate is 10 times worse than Stansted, the best performing UK hub. Data from aeronautical intelligence company OAG, provided exclusively to Sky News, shows that more than 3 percent of scheduled flights from Gatwick did not take place, compared to 0.3 percent of those from Stansted.
It further revealed that June was Gatwick’s worst month this year, with one in 14 flights from the airport being cancelled.
The data is provided to OAG by airlines, government agencies and other sources, and a cancellation is defined as any flight that an airline has published to operate that has not been canceled at least 48 hours prior to departure.
A spokesman for Gatwick Airport told the news agency it regrets any cancellations and disruptions to passengers – explaining that it will carefully increase capacity in the coming months “so that airlines fly more reliable flight programs 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 have to manage.
Ryanair was the best performing major airline in the world – it has canceled just 0.3 percent of flights so far this year.
British Airways is the worst performing British airline.
At 3.5 percent, passengers are more than 12 times more likely to have canceled a BA flight than a Ryanair flight in the first six months of 2022.
This data relates to flights up to July 10 and does not include the further 10,300 cancellations announced by the company that affect flights starting before the end of October.
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Globally, China Eastern, based in Shanghai, has been by far the hardest hit, a product of the severe lockdown in the city from March.
A BA spokesman attributed some of the problems to major storms in February, when one in seven flights was canceled in a week-long period, the peak of the year.
It also had an IT failure at the end of March, coinciding with the short-term cancellation of a tenth of flights.
The airline also highlighted increased exposure to global factors such as the Russian war in Ukraine and ongoing Covid restrictions in Asia, compared to easyJet and Ryanair flying only within Europe.
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Gatwick airport has the most canceled flights than any other major airport in Britain
The figures show that at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, easyJet was the hardest-hit global airline.
It canceled more than 50 percent of its 200,000 scheduled flights that year and more than 99 percent of all flights scheduled to depart in April 2020.
OAG says consumers may have been blocked by airlines from booking many of these flights during the first frenetic period of the pandemic, though they were only formally canceled less than 48 hours before their scheduled departure time.