Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder, Thursday the 13th of June and I am at an extremely busy Manchester airport as perhaps you can hear.

There are tens of thousands of people on the move today. Many of them are heading over

of course to Germany for the Euro 2024 finals. I've already seen a couple of people in

Kiltz, Scotland kick off against the hosts Germany on Friday evening in Munich.

But what has caught my attention is an assessment of the latest punctuality figures

by the PA News Agency.

So this has been looking at CAA, Civil Aviation Authority, delay statistics of the whole of 2023.

And if like me, you prefer your flights to depart on time, well, I'm afraid it makes quite disappointing reading.

Whizair, an airline I fly on fairly frequently, has an average delay of 32 minutes. So yeah, that means that if you're flying on a typical whiz air flight, you can expect it to leave half an hour late.

That's not the same thing as arriving half an hour

late because of course airlines tend to build in a bit of padding, particularly if they're flying

from constricted airports. Heathrow Gatwick, maybe a bit of Luton where Wissair has its main

UK base. But there we are half an hour late, that's not great.

Turkish Airlines, which flies in and out of Manchester,

that recorded an average delay of 29 minutes.

That's not great, not least, because so many passengers are connecting at Istanbul Airport and Tuwi Europe's biggest holiday

company well they are on 28 minutes which won't cheer them up because it's 10

minutes worse than their great rival jet too and most UK and Irish

airlines were fairly mid-table in terms of the average delay.

British Airways, 22 minutes, easy to get, 201. Ryanair, 20 minutes.

The standout success among the major British carriers, definitely Virgin Atlantic.

But even then, its average delay was 14 minutes late

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