EUROCONTROL Flash Briefing 2026 - Week 24

Our second Summer Flash Briefing of 2026, covering the second week of June (Week 24, 8-14 June), shows stable summer conditions for European air traffic, with traffic gently up week-on-week by 1.5% to 34,983 daily flights, and 1.2% higher than 2025. In parallel, compared to the equivalent period last summer, punctuality was up and delays were down, despite ongoing Middle East crisis impacts.

Traffic distribution remains strongly influenced by the Middle East crisis, with lower traffic in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Türkiye, but a high increase in traffic in Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia – and continuous 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.

The ongoing successful application of updated capacity and weather-based operations procedures and related scenarios has now led to approximately 400K minutes of en-route ATFM delays having been saved.

Overall, arrival punctuality stood at 76%, 0.4% down compared to Week 23, but 1.5% up on 2025.

The number of flights delayed by ATFM restrictions was 40,004, 16% of all flights and on average 5,715 a day.

The main network hot spots were in France, which generated 28% of en-route delays – of which 9.2% attributed to the Reims, 5.5% Marseille and 5.1% 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 (23.2%, of which 13.6% was due to Barcelona, 3.7% Sevilla & 5% Madrid ACCs, reflecting capacity, staffing & high traffic growth); and in Greece (14%, of which 9.5% due to Athens ACC and the remainder to Makedonia ACC, the result of capacity, staffing and demand related to the Middle East crisis).

Files

EUROCONTROL Flash Briefing 2026 - Week 24

Was this page helpful?