For Week 35 (25-31 August 2025):
Traffic: Week 35’s total of 35,756 average daily flights, 250,291 in all, set a new record as the highest total weekly traffic ever recorded across the European aviation network. Total traffic was again slightly above the previous week, +4% vs 2024, and +1% vs 2019 levels.
ATFM delays: Averaged 4.3 minutes per flight — 31% above the previous week, due to a significant increase in weather-related delays and 1% higher than in 2024. A total of 63,028 flights were delayed by air traffic flow management (ATFM) restrictions, an average of 9,004 flights a day and 25% of all flights.
Arrival punctuality: Down 2.8 percentage points vs Week 34 to 71%, and better than last year by 3.1 percentage points.
Network hot spots:
- France (29% of all delays in the network): Affected by ongoing capacity and staffing issues, and weather.
- Greece (12% of all delays in the network): Affected mostly by staffing issues and weather.
- Spain (10% of all delays in the network): Affected by capacity issues related to high demand and weather.
Network Operations Plan (NOP) delivery:
- With 3.9% year-to-date traffic growth, en-route ATFM delay so far is 26% 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.
- However, Marseille Area Control Centre (ACC) did not fully provide the capacity planned in the NOP (generating 140K delay minutes).
Actions to be taken: Marseille and Reims ACCs will need to revise their plans to align with the NOP for the upcoming weeks. The implementation of capacity management scenarios by EUROCONTROL’s Network Manager Operations Centre (NMOC) will be further amplified and, in this context, the proactive support of all ANSPs will be further requested.
Weather: Convective weather affected significant parts of the network for most of the week. The scenarios pre-agreed between the ANSPs and the EUROCONTROL Network Manager (NM), moving traffic away from areas of forecasted convective weather, saved 74K minutes of delay across the week, 16% of the total weather delay in Week 35.
Industrial actions: The ongoing industrial action at Beograd ACC resulted in 41K minutes of ATFM delay during Week 35, which is in a similar order of magnitude as during other summer weeks, when they were related to capacity and weather issues in the context of sustained traffic growth.