These continued to affect traffic distribution across the network, resulting in lower air traffic in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Türkiye; and more flights in Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia, coupled with continuous traffic growth in South-West Europe.
The vast majority of air navigation service providers (ANSPs) are delivering according to their planned Network Operations Plan capacity commitments, and the EUROCONTROL Network Manager continues to work closely with all ANSPs to keep en-route air traffic flow management (ATFM) delays down.
In response to the first strong weather phenomena of the year, the updated capacity and weather-based operations procedures and related scenarios have been successfully applied, with around 300K minutes of en-route ATFM delay now saved this year in total.
Overall, arrival punctuality stood at 76%, 0.8% down compared to Week 22, but 0.4% up on 2025.
The number of flights delayed by ATFM restrictions was 41,599, 17% of all flights and on average 5,943 a day.
The main network hot spots were in France, which generated 27% of en-route delays – of which 9.4% attributed to the Reims, 5.5% Marseille and 5% Brest area control centres (ACCs), mainly owing to capacity issues, staff shortages & transition issues with 4-FLIGHT, DSNA's new collaborative ATFM system; in Spain (24%, of which 13.7% was due to Barcelona, 4% Sevilla & 5.1% Madrid ACCs, reflecting capacity, staffing & high traffic growth); and in Greece (14%, of which 9.4% due to Athens ACC and the remainder to Makedonia ACC, the result of capacity, staffing and demand related to the Middle East crisis).