EUROCONTROL Flash Briefing: European aviation network in Week 29 (14-20 July 2025)

EUROCONTROL Flash Briefings provide you with an update on how the network is performing during the busy summer season. 

For Week 29 (14-20 July 2025):

Traffic: 35,532 average daily flights, slightly below the previous week, +4% vs 2024, and 101% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels. The peak traffic of 2025 was recorded on Friday 18 July, with 37,034 flights, just 194 flights short of the all-time traffic record of 37,228 flights on 28 June 2019.

ATFM delays: Averaged 4.4 minutes per flight — a 12% increase from the previous week, and 46% lower than in 2024. A total of 63,738 flights were delayed by air traffic flow management (ATFM) restrictions, an average of 9,105 flights a day and 26% of all flights. Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 July had more than 200,000 minutes of ATFM delay (211,270 and 232,158 respectively); more than 50% of those delays were caused by bad weather conditions.

Arrival punctuality: Down 1.8 percentage points vs Week 28 to 69% and better than last year by 10.8 percentage points.

Network hot spots:

• France (31% of all delays in the network): Affected by on-going capacity and staffing issues, compounded by adverse weather.
• Germany (18% of all delays in the network): Affected mostly by weather and some capacity issues.
• Spain (7% of all delays in the network): Affected by weather and some capacity issues related to high demand.

Network Operations Plan (NOP) delivery:

With 3.9% year-to-date traffic growth, en-route ATFM delay so far is 23% better than 2024, with good delivery by all air navigation service providers (ANSPs) in South-East Europe, Central Europe, Italy and Switzerland.

Most ANSPs are delivering the agreed capacity. Significant reductions of delays are being seen for:

• Budapest ACC where delays are 90% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 6.6%;
• Tirana ACC where delays are 86% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 10%;
• Zagreb ACC where delays are 84% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 9%;
• Bucuresti ACC where delays are 78% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 5.3%;
• Sofia ACC where delays are 77% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 5.1%;
• Beograd ACC where delays are 61 % lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 7.9%;
• Karlsruhe UAC where delays are 50% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 3.5%;
• Warszawa ACC where delays are 42% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 5.1%;
• Geneva ACC where delays are 38% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 2.2%;
• Vienna ACC where delays are 30% lower than in 2024 for a traffic growth of 12.6%.

However, Marseille ACC is not fully providing the planned capacity (generating 170K delay minutes).

Actions to be taken: Brest and Reims ACCs will need to revise their plans to align with the NOP for the upcoming weeks.

Weather: Convective weather affected parts of the network every day except Friday. On Thursday 17 July, forecasts for Bulgaria and Romania were too optimistic with the weather being more severe than forecast; in the UK the forecast for Saturday 19 July was far too pessimistic compared to the reality of the observations. The scenarios pre-agreed between the ANSPs and the Network Manager (NM), have increased stability in the Network, moving traffic away from areas of forecast convective weather, saving 63,527 minutes of delay across the week, 13% of the total weather delay in Week 29.

Source: eurocontrol