Holiday flight passengers faced fewer delays at UK airports last summer, including in and out of Heathrow and London City, official punctuality figures showed.
A total of 73% of charter flights were on time at 10 major UK airports in July-September 2011 - a 10% improvement on the same period in 2010, the Civil Aviation Authority said.
The average delay to charter flights last summer was 22 minutes, an improvement on the 30-minute figure in summer 2010.
The statistics covered flights in and out of Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, London City, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow airports.
The planes-on-time figure was probably boosted in summer 2011 by the fact that there were 4.1% fewer charter flights than in summer 2010.
However, scheduled flight punctuality at the 10 airports improved even though there were 0.4% more scheduled flights in summer 2011 than in summer 2010.
A total of 79% of scheduled flights were on time in July-September 2011 compared with only 72% in July-September last year.
The average schedule flight delay fell from 16 minutes in summer 2010 to just 12 minutes in summer 2011.
The biggest increases in on-time scheduled flight performance in summer this year were seen at Gatwick (up 13%), Luton (up 11%) and Stansted (up 10%).
Among the 75 scheduled and charter destinations with the most passengers in the third quarter of 2011, flights to and from Larnaca in Cyprus had the worst on-time performance (61%), while the Canadian city of Toronto had the highest average delay - of 23 minutes.
Credit TPA
Gravity always wins!