Airports are extremely expensive to operate, and while every airport around the world has its peak hours of operation - there are equally as many hours of the day when many are like ghost towns, as they await their next flights and passengers. Even for airports such as Dubai and Atlanta that serve as major hubs connecting travellers across the globe, there are moments of relative calm. For smaller regional airports these quiet moments can be quite pronounced.

Ultimately, airports are assets and like any asset maximising its utilisation is crucial. This means filling those quiet moments of the day becomes crucial for every airport planning team. To highlight how that can be done we’ve focused on one airport that has been particularly successful in recent times and all on one runway: London Gatwick (LGW).

London Gatwick is widely regarded as having the busiest single runway in the world, although with a planning application likely to be approved that may change in the next decade. In 2024 the airport handled 43.2 million passengers and some 262,000 movements, a far cry from the 26.8 million handled in 2000 - significant growth achieved without any new runway or terminal expansion.

The chart below shows the number of scheduled flights departing each hour for the busiest day of those years between 05:00 and 23:00. Each line shows the growth in departures driven by new airlines operating at the airport and existing airlines such as easyJet, Wizzair and British Airways launching new routes and bases. Not surprisingly, the peak departure hour of 06:00 has seen the largest growth from just 5 departures to Tenerife, Brussels, Faro, Edinburgh and Paris in 2000 to 36 this year - with easyJet alone planning 27 departures. In total there are 439 scheduled departures on the busiest day compared to 301 departures in 2000, an impressive 45% growth in scheduled movements.

Intriguingly the peak hour for departures in 2000 was 11:00 with 28, in 2025 that hour now has less departures with 22, although in the same hour arrivals have increased by nearly 40% so actual usage of the runway has increased to 47 movements in the hour. 

With arrivals permitted throughout the day - although restricted late at night and early in the morning - the growth pattern is slightly different from that of departures. Reflective of Gatwick increasingly serving the local outbound demand the 39 arrivals between 05:00 and 08:00 this year are considerably below the 67 of 2000 when the airport was still a major arrival point for flights from the United States with services from Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Charlotte among the markets served.

The increasing local market position of Gatwick is also reflected in what were two of the quietest late hours of the day (22:00 & 23:00) when only four flights were scheduled to arrive in 2000, now handle 59 services, much to the pleasure of the handlers meeting those flights and clearing the baggage!

London Gatwick’s busiest scheduled hour of the day this year will be 13:00 when 54 flights are planned, which is very similar to the 12:00 peak in 2000. However, the departing and arriving points of those flights are very different to twenty-five years ago with a greater focus on European markets.

As a case study in maximising asset utilisation London Gatwick has done a great job in filling in the gaps and maximising their passenger throughput and of course revenues while at the same time firmly reaching a point where no more flights can be handled; after all, 54 in one hour is impressive on a single runway by any measure. Every airport in the world strives to replicate the growth and success that Gatwick has seen and that is precisely why airport CEOs are always reminding their commercial teams to “mind the gap”.