Canada’s Toronto airport rated world’s worst for delays

Canada’s flight hub -- Toronto Pearson International Airport – has been rated the world’s worst for flight delays so far this summer amid widespread flight disruptions across the globe in a busy travel season.

A whopping 52.5 percent of the airport's scheduled flights between May 26 and July 19 were delayed, according to data by flight tracking site FlightAware, which further shows that Toronto Pearson ranks No. 4 for flight cancellations globally, with 6.5 percent of its flights canceled during the same period.

The surge in flight delays and cancellations comes as airports have been scrambling for months to handle the rising demand in air travel because the lifting of Covid-19 journey restrictions collides with the usually busy summer travel season.

Many airways and airports have failed to hire enough workers to satisfy the demand after letting go staff amid the pandemic and the journey hibernation it precipitated.

Authorities at Toronto Pearson were quoted in press reports as saying that they, too, had been caught by the surge in visitors. They further insisted that they had little time to adapt to the fast-rising demand since airline bookings in Canada didn’t enhance considerably till late May and June.

Air Canada operates nearly 55 percent of all flights at Toronto Pearson. More than one-third of its arriving planes in June had been late disembarking passengers.

Air Canada blamed its flight disruptions on the airport’s baggage-system breakdowns and overstretched workers at border, as well as safety and air-traffic management operations, which are operated by separate authorities.

“All of these bodies must work well and together for the entire system to function properly,” the airline added.

This is while Toronto Pearson handles nearly 50 percent of Canada’s international flights and about half of the nation’s air cargo.

While waiting time to clear Canadian border screening has improved just recently, lineups are nonetheless so lengthy that arriving international flights are holding passengers on the planes for a median of 16 minutes till they are allowed to affix the strains, an airport spokesman stated.

The wait is much longer for US-bound vacationers, who needed to wait as much as 75 minutes earlier this month due to a scarcity of US border officers stationed within the airport to pre-clear passengers, the spokesman added.

Europe also plagued with delays

Flight disruptions have also been quite extreme in Europe, which depends heavily on the type of international air travel that has been held again probably the most by COVID restrictions.

Seven of the world's worst 10 airports for delays this summer -- ranked by the percentage of scheduled flights delayed -- are in Europe. Airports in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam and London are seeing the most significant delays, according to FlightAware data.

After Toronto, the following two worst massive airports on this planet when it comes to delays for June and July had been Canada’s Montreal Airport and Germany’s Frankfurt Airport, with departure delay charges of 48.2 and 46.2 percent, respectively.

London's Heathrow Airport recently took the extraordinary step of asking airlines to stop selling tickets for outbound travel this summer, local news outlets further reported.

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