The Department for Transport has added a monthly indicator tracking short-notice cancellations of commercial passenger flights arriving at and departing from UK airports to its faster-indicators transport series.
The series began in September 2026. The DfT added the indicator and its accompanying methodology note on 9 September, and says the data will normally be updated monthly on the second Wednesday of each month. The department also says the timing may change in special circumstances.
The underlying figures report that 0.8% of both arriving and departing commercial passenger flights were recorded as cancelled in July 2026. The DfT characterises the July rate as consistent with its 2025 baseline.
There were 92,021 departing commercial passenger flights recorded during July, of which 727 had a cancelled status. For arrivals, 92,000 commercial passenger flights were recorded and 749 were cancelled.
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The measure is national rather than airport- or airline-specific. It covers commercial passenger flights arriving at and departing from UK airports, and the accompanying web analysis does not provide cancellation rates for individual airports. The published national figure should therefore not be treated as an airport-specific forecast.
The DfT calculates the cancellation percentage by dividing the number of flights with a cancelled status by all flights with a reported status. Flight-status information is obtained from Cirium Aviation Analytics, and the department holds the data as departmental management information.
The September update follows the DfT’s initial publication of monthly short-notice cancellation analysis on 10 August 2026, which covered the period from May to July. The 9 September action incorporated the indicator and its methodology into the faster-indicators series.
For airport taxi and private-hire operators, the series can provide a high-level indication of potential disruption to pre-booked pickup demand. It does not measure passenger no-shows or ground-transport demand directly, and it does not show conditions at a particular airport.
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