When’s the best time to fly? Airports reveal their calmest periods for flight departures

Many UK airports are experiencing their busiest summer in history, with more British people flying away on holiday than ever before.

Anyone who has endured the “first wave” of flights – typically starting before 6am and continuing to around 8am – will know that this is when airports are at their busiest. Airlines need to get airborne as early in the day as possible, extracting the maximum productivity from their planes and crew.

The pressure on ground transport, security checkpoints, cafes and shops is highest early in the morning.

Conversely, booking a flight when most passengers have already left the ground means progress through the airport is much easier. While budget airlines will typically plan two or three rotations (there-and-back trips) for each aircraft in the course of a day, the pressure is always highest early on.

But at what point in the day does the magic moment occur when half the passengers have departed?

The Independent has asked all the top UK airports. Assuming flights start leaving at 6am and finish at 11pm, if departures were evenly spread, the halfway point would be 2.30pm. In practice, though, all but one of the airports have their midway moment earlier. The answers vary sharply between airports, and can also depend on the day of the week. Birmingham is earliest at 8am, Southampton latest at 2.50pm.

This is your time planner for smoother flying.

Birmingham: 8am

The West Midlands airport is the only one in England that has been given permission to relax the “liquids rule” – which is good news considering the scale of the first wave of flights. Birmingham is seeing some of its busiest days ever, with more than 26,000 departing passengers – half of whom “will leave before eight o’clock in the morning” according to Al Titterington, the terminal operations director speaking to The Independent’s daily travel podcast.

Manchester: 11am

“We reached the halfway point today at just after 11am,” a spokesperson told me. “That is broadly the same most days. Terminal 3 is the slight outlier in that it gets to halfway at around 9.30am most days.” That terminal is the low-cost hub for easyJet and Ryanair.

Belfast International: 11.20am

The team at the main Northern Ireland airport took the trouble to send an entire week’s flying programme, in which the earliest halfway…