- European air traffic increased by 2.3pc during summer 2025 with 10.8m minutes of delays recorded
- Airspace capacity constraints account for nearly 50pc of all European flight delays
- Entry/Exit System queues reached five hours at some airports with 60pc rise in missed connections
- Jet fuel costs more than doubled since Middle East crisis with SAF prices following similar trajectory
- Air ticket prices fell 1pc in first half of 2025 as airlines absorbed cost increases
Eurocontrol data is showing that European air traffic has risen by 2.3pc during summer 2025, according to Ourania Georgoutsakou of Airlines for Europe. The briefing in Brussels has heard that delays reached 10.8m minutes during the season, representing approximately €1bn in costs to carriers. Airspace capacity constraints are accounting for nearly 50pc of all delays across the continent.
Georgoutsakou shared that staffing shortages and insufficient capacity across European airspace remained persistent problems. The estimated traffic growth averaged 2pc annually, according to Eurocontrol projections. She shared that the problem required urgent resolution as traffic continued to expand.
The briefing heard that the Entry/Exit System produced queues of up to five hours at some European airports during summer. One member airline reported a 60pc increase in missed connections at hubs during the early summer season. Georgoutsakou shared that pre-registration applications required faster roll-out across Europe. Jet fuel costs more than doubled since the beginning of the Middle East crisis, reaching 115pc above previous levels according to IATA data. Air ticket prices were approximately 1pc lower in the first half of 2025 compared to the previous year.
Ourania “Rania” Georgoutsakou CEO of A4E shared: summer 2025 shows that Europeans still need and want to fly because traffic was up this summer, 2.3pc according to the Eurocontrol database. Unfortunately, we also had 10.8 million minutes of delays. That’s the equivalent of 20½ years of all our collective lives lost in the air or on the ground, and about one billion euros in costs to the airlines. So airspace and capacity remain a problem. That’s because it’s almost 50pc of all delays. There’s just not enough SAF and not enough capacity across Europe. Traffic will continue to grow. We are holding ourselves back by having these kinds of problems.
The estimated traffic growth is an average of 2pc every year according to Eurocontrol. So it really is more than late that this problem is resolved. On the EES entry/exit system, we experienced during the summer queues of up to five or five-and-a-half hours at some European airports. And I have a member airline telling me that at some point at the beginning of the summer season they were up 60pc on missed connections in hubs. This really should have come as no surprise. The traffic and what the peak hours were was a surprise to nobody because airlines publish their schedules, as you all know, one year in advance. So the proper roll-out of an EES system would also mean that we plan and allocate the staff and the resources to make sure that there are no bottlenecks and that passengers are not sitting in queues on their way to where they need to be.
We have to be pragmatic. We need to be giving authorities a pause button whenever the queue gets too long, and that needs to be put into the system as a permanent fixture. And we also really need to get the pre-registration app rolled out way more quickly across Europe, because it’s a really silly idea to have people queuing at an airport when you can have them already pre-registering at home rather than all sitting in a line. And finally, the Middle East impact. I think you have all been following the cost of jet fuel, which has more than doubled since the beginning of this crisis.
At some point a couple of weeks ago, according to IATA, we were at plus 115pc on the cost of jet fuel. Interestingly enough, SAF prices are also following the same curve and are increasing, even though they are not at all the same product, not from the same feedstock, and don’t come from the same part of the world. So there’s clearly something there to be looked into about that market and how it’s functioning. Despite that, air tickets were around 1pc lower in the first half of this year compared to a year earlier, which means that airlines are doing their best to absorb as much as possible.
That is not a sustainable situation if the cost of fuel continues to remain at these levels, looking ahead at all the business and regulatory costs that Europe is placing on European airlines. So I think Europe is at a crossroads, and decision-makers have a choice: to keep Europe connected, to keep Europeans’ option to fly when and where they need to, and to keep European airlines competitive
