The busiest airport in Europe made the headlines again since the interest to expand the airport has been reinvigorated recently. As the biggest amongst the four serving as the major gateway into the UK’s capital, the airport saw over 1200 daily flights. With a continually growing demand for travelling in and out of the capital and the restriction on airport activity – a curfew which is that is common across Europe –– Heathrow is looking for an expansion plan to increase its capacity as the competition for operation slots because a valuable asset.
In a statement to support the proposal, Thomas Woldbye asserts that the expansion plan will improve punctuality as a third runway could ease out congestion at the apron and build resilience as the new infrastructure provides additional resources to handle and recover from disruption, including winter storms that have become more frequent.
According to the data collected for March 18 2025, over 40% of the flights landing or departing from the airport were delayed by more than 15 minutes. However, based on public data sources, there is little evidence to show that the delay is caused by the limit in infrastructure capacity at the airport. Nevertheless, comparing on time performance between flights operating out of Terminal 5 – the primary terminal that British Airways runs – with other terminals, there is little to no difference to on time performance on the aggregate.
Before making any conclusion for the case of a third runway at the flag carrier’s main hub using public data, it will be interesting to observe how the on time performance varies across the time horizon. While there is little data available in the public domain to attribute delays to airport operation over other factors, such as airline operation, air traffic control, landside operations, industrial action, and weather, additional analysis on these aforementioned contributing reasons to delay could infer the importance of the infrastructure capacity of the on time performance at the airport and how much economic return could be generated from this new proposal.
Author’s Note:
The data obtained for this analysis is collected from the Heathrow’s webpage on the date. There exist some data gap which has not been fully addressed in this short article.