Which flights are most likely to be delayed at Christmas at your airport

If you’re thinking of getting away this Christmas, our gadget reveals how likely your flight is to be delayed, and how long your wait will be. Almost half (45%) of all flights from UK airports were delayed by at least 15 minutes last December, according to punctuality data from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). This year airports will be busy with many people heading overseas for festive holidays or arriving in the UK to spend Christmas with loved ones.

Heathrow Airport expects 6.5 million passengers will travel through its terminals this month, with tens of thousands departing on Christmas Day. Eight routes can claim to be the most regularly delayed out of the country, when limiting it to those with at least 10 flights. Every single one of the flights on the eight routes were delayed by at least 15 minutes last December.

If you’re heading away this December, you can search for your route in our gadget to see how it fared last year: Two of those were from London airports – British Airways’ service from Gatwick to Kingston, and the BA route from Heathrow to Hong Kong. The other six were all from Manchester Airport – Tui Airways to Cancun, Bangladesh Airlines to Dhakha, Tui Airways to Cape Verde, Kuwait Airways to Kuwait, Tui Airways to Montego Bay, and Tui Airways to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic.

Pegasus Airlines’ flight from Manchester to Istanbul, meanwhile, had a delay rate of 97%. The Tui Airways flight from Manchester to Bridgetown, Barbados had a rate of 96%, while Eva Air flights from Heathrow to Taipei had a rate of 94%, as did BA flights from Heathrow to Accra. When it comes to the average amount of time spent waiting for a flight though, one route has delays longer than two football matches.

TUI’s flights from Manchester to Cancun had an average delay of 208 minutes last December.

That’s followed by four other Manchester Airport flights – TUI to Fuerteventura (171 minutes), Singapore Airlines to Singapore (157 minutes), TUI to Bridgetown (145 minutes), and Ryanair to Faro (138 minutes).