LONDON – For those that could be traveling through or are just genuinely interested, we ask the following question: How busy is London Stansted Airport?
This piece will take an inside look into London Stansted Airport, using data from flight tracking company RadarBox.com.
Without further ado, let’s get into the numbers…
London Stansted Was Very Busy in January…
For the last week of January (January 29-February 5), the airport handled 414 flights, which is an increase of 16.29% compared to the same period last year.
In that week, the airport was around 50 movements short of achieving pre-pandemic levels, but this does appear to be an outlier if you look at the rest of that month, as you will see in the table below:
| Date | 2019 Numbers | 2022 Numbers | 2023 Numbers | Percentage Difference (2023 vs. 2022) |
| January 1-8 | 439 movements | 421 movements | 600 movements | +42.52% |
| January 8-15 | 456 movements | 229 movements | 554 movements | +141.92% |
| January 15-22 | 442 movements | 231 movements | 515 movements | +122.94% |
| January 22-29 | 481 movements | 233 movements | 438 movements | +87.98% |
What you can see from the data is that in the three weeks of January, the airport was significantly busier compared to the same period last year and was even exceeding pre-pandemic numbers by a fair amount.
So from this data, 2023 does look to be a busy period for London Stansted thus far.
Such recovery has been taking place since the latter stages of 2022, with the airport announcing that 1.83 million passengers entered in November alone.
As well as that, in the 12 months ending November 2022, 22.3 million passengers were handled, which represented an increase of 247% in the same period in 2021.
Ryanair Contributes A Lot to London Stansted Being Busy…
Based on averaged data, Ryanair contributes the most to London Stansted Airport is busy, with its average daily movements coming in at 384 flights for the Irish subsidiary and 21 for the UK division.
This comes as no surprise, given the fact that Dublin, Rome Ciampino, Edinburgh, and Milan Bergamo are in the top four for city pairs out of Stansted.
Competitors such as easyJet, Jet2, Pegasus, and others don’t even come close in terms of offering that high volume of flights per day from the airport.
In terms of cargo, FedEx remains joint busiest with West Atlantic UK with seven daily movements on average.
UPS comes at the bottom of the table with 4 daily flights, shared with regional carrier Loganair.
Overall…
It remains clear that London Stansted is a busy airport in the UK, with them only two daily movements away from matching London Gatwick Airport.
With new route additions and frequency upgrades, the airport could become the second busiest airport in the country, although they wouldn’t get anywhere near London Heathrow Airport.
Given its fast recovery and significant route additions, there is nothing to stop the airport from getting into the second-busiest spot and thriving onwards.
