What Are The UK"s Busiest Domestic Air Routes?

More than three million people traveled domestically last summer.


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For a country that is relatively small in size, the UK has its fair share of domestic air routes. According to Cirium, there were almost 500 million available seat miles scheduled for August 2022, across just over 18,000 flights, all going from a UK airport to another UK airport.

Read more: 90,421 Flights Are Scheduled September 5th: The Top 10 Airports & Airlines

How does this summer shape up?

In terms of this summer, the biggest routes scheduled via Cirium were mostly between the capital of London and the two major cities of Scotland - Edinburgh and Glasgow. London Heathrow to Glasgow, served by British Airways, had the most capacity, with 12 million seat miles scheduled across the month and 198 flights.

A close second comes Heathrow to Edinburgh, also a BA route, with 200 flights providing 11.4 million available seat miles in each direction. easyJet’s Belfast to Gatwick route had almost 10 million available seat miles on its 164 August flights each way.

The only one of the top five routes served by two airlines was Glasgow – London Gatwick, which saw 121 flights by easyJet and 31 by British Airways for a total of 26,000 seats and 9.8 million seat miles each way. Rounding off the list is easyJet’s Edinburgh – Gatwick connection with 124 flights for 21,000 seats and 7.5 million seat miles in each direction.

While these schedules, all taken from traditionally the busiest period in the UK air travel calendar, give us some indication of the UK’s busiest domestic routes, it’s not the whole story. Scheduled seats don’t mean they’re being sat in, and while airlines are pretty slick at predicting travel demand on specific routes, until we get their load factor reports back from this period, we won’t know how many people actually traveled on these flights.

Looking back for clues to the busiest UK routes

The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) publishes its statistics for UK domestic air travel each year. The most recent report available runs from July to September last year, and largely supports what we’re seeing in the trends of today’s scheduled services. In total, three million passengers traveled on domestic UK flights in that period.

As expected, the busiest domestic routes were between Heathrow and Scotland, with the top spot held by Heathrow to Edinburgh, not Glasgow. Last summer, 125,707 passengers traveled this route in both directions, compared with 118,632 on the Glasgow – Heathrow connection.

Gatwick to Belfast remained in the third spot, with 112,006 passengers across the three months of last summer. Surprisingly, however, Gatwick to Glasgow was not the fourth busiest – in fact, it was down in eighth place. The fourth spot went to the Heathrow to Belfast City route with 112,006 passengers – a route that is unserved this summer, likely due to slot permission changes.

Rounding out the top five is another surprise contender – Belfast to Liverpool with 104,625 passengers. This year, it’s not even in the top 10, with easyJet only offering around 20,000 seats per month on the route. This could be due to easyJet directing more capacity at overseas holiday destinations, given the relaxation of COVID-related travel restrictions that were still hampering 2021 travel.

Other popular routes last year included Belfast to Manchester, Belfast to Birmingham, Gatwick to Edinburgh, Heathrow to Aberdeen, Belfast to Edinburgh, and Bristol to Edinburgh. In all, more than a third (37%) of domestic passengers were flying in or out of Northern Ireland, while slightly more (39%) were flying to and from the Scottish mainland. More than half (53%) were either flying to or from a London area airport.