Less than a day’s-worth of flying has been cut from easyJet’s summer schedule with the majority of affected services at Gatwick – the airline’s largest base.
Around 1,700 flights have been cancelled out of a total of 90,000 across the budget airline’s network for the remainder of the summer.
The adjustments and consolidation of a minority of flights comes in the face of air traffic control restrictions across European airspace and the threat of strikes at provider Eurocontrol.
A spokesperson for the budget airline said: “We are currently operating up to around 1,800 flights and carrying around 250,000 customers per day with more crew and pilots flying than ever before and, like all airlines, we review our flights on an ongoing basis.
“As Eurocontrol has stated, the whole industry is seeing challenging conditions this summer with more constrained air space due to the war in Ukraine resulting in unprecedented ATC delays, as well as further potential ATC strike action.
“We have therefore made some pre-emptive adjustments to our programme consolidating a small number of flights at Gatwick, where we have multiple daily frequencies, in order to help mitigate these external challenges on the day of travel for our customers and we continue to operate around over 90,000 flights over this period.
“Customers whose flights are affected are being informed, with 95% customers being rebooked onto an alternative flight and all customers provided with the option to rebook or receive a refund.
“We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused.”
Eurocontrol, which manages flights over Europe, says one of its unions could take industrial action this summer, although dates have not been announced yet