In 2023, air transport in Europe was severely affected by thousands of canceled or delayed flights. Millions of passengers were affected by the flight disruption. You may have wondered why these disruptions occurred in the flight schedule. Some of you blamed the airline, others maybe blamed the airports, many times you argued with the ground staff.
Eurocontrol, the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation and the one that monitors air traffic in Europe, comes up with a series of explanations to shed light on this issue.
According to the statistics presented by Eurocontrol, the average flight delay increased in 2023 to 14.5 minutes, while in 2022 the average delay was 9.5 minutes. Punctuality on arrival has also deteriorated greatly. Only 7.4% of flights arrived on time, within 15 minutes between the scheduled time and the actual time.
A further analysis of the causes of the delay shows that reactionary (triggered) delay contributed the most to the average flight delay, with a weight of 43% of the delay minutes, which means 6,3 minutes on the flight.
The causes related to the airlines, such as ground handling and understaffing ranked second, with 4 minutes per flight.
Another cause of delays was "ATFM delay", which is defined as the time between the last estimated take-off time and the actual take-off time. ATFM delay includes both airport ATFM delay and en-route ATFM delay. in 2023, the average of this delay was 1.2 minutes/flight.
Here's how a series of delays on each flight can trigger serious flight schedule disruptions in a chain.
It doesn't matter if we are talking about low-cost or full-service companies, 2023 being an extremely challenging one for all airlines, but also for airports. It is true that, in Romania, Wizz Air had the most canceled or delayed flights, but TAROM, RYANAIR, Lufthansa, Air France etc. flights were also affected.
If you have faced TAROM flight delay, Wizz Air, Lufthansa, etc., know that there is a good chance that you will be entitled to compensation of up to 600 euros.
Very few people know this and very few passengers know their air passenger rights. But we want to come to your support and clarify this situation!
These rights have been established by the EU faci fac part din the rights of air traffic passengers (To read). So we are not talking here about territorial laws or laws made by airlines, but about European Union directives.