PRESTWICK has played its part in a busy August of air travel as the UK flight traffic increase continued through the holiday season.

NATS, the UK’s major provider of air traffic services, safely handled 240,672 flights in August, an increase of almost five per cent on the same month last year.

Much of the NATS operation is based at Prestwick Centre, a purpose-built facility on the town's Fresson Avenue.

Here, around 700 staff help support and safely guide aircraft around UK airspace and further afield.

The fastest growing markets for flights were Turkey, up 15 per cent on August 2023 and the Canary Islands, up 12 per cent.

Routes to Spain, France and Italy continued to be the most popular overall. Transatlantic overflights also continued to grow in August, by more than 11 per cent year on year.

NATS handled 24 per cent of Europe’s traffic, according to Eurocontrol, and was accountable for just 1.3 per cent of overall delay.

Ninety-eight per cent of flights received no NATS-attributable delay, and the average delay per delayed flight was 13.5 minutes.

Kathryn Leahy, chief operations officer, said: “We are now very close to the record levels of traffic we had in 2019 and at some points in the day, parts of the network are exceeding those previous levels.

“I think we can safely say that we will soon be into new record figures and comparisons with pre-pandemic traffic will be firmly in the past.”