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According to new data, the cancellation rate is 10 times worse than Stansted, the best-performing British hub. The data provided by the air travel intelligence company OAG, provided exclusively to Sky News, suggested that more than 3 percent of planned flights from Gatwick didn’t take place, compared with 0.3 percent of those from Stansted.

It further revealed that June was Gatwick’s worst month this year where one in every 14 flights from the airport were 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 told the news agency that 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.

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

British Airways is the worst-performing UK airline.

At 3.5 percent, passengers are over 12 times more likely to have had a BA flight cancelled than a Ryanair one when flying in the first six months of 2022.

This data covers flights up to July 10 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.

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Gatwick airport has the most cancelled flights than any other major airport in Britain

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

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

OAG says consumers may have been blocked by airlines from booking many of these flights during the first frantic period of the pandemic, although they were not formally called off until less than 48 hours before the scheduled take-off time.

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