According to new data released by Flighty, a flight tracking programme, Ryanair bore the largest percentage of delayed flights among all major airlines worldwide in 2025. The results were released as part of Flighty’s very first Global Passport Report and were based on enormous amounts of anonymised data and actual travel trends collected from millions of individuals globally.
The research strongly suggests that air travel has continued and will continue to expand at extremely high levels, but there will continue to be large numbers of disappointed travellers due to the overwhelming number of delays experienced worldwide.
Millions of Flights, Millions of Lost Hours
Users of the app. Flighty together flew over 22 million commercial airliner routed flights in the year of 2025. Travelling an estimated 34 billion air miles with 78 million hours spent travelling in commercial airliners, this time equates to nearly 9,000 years and 38 minutes in total of flying by the community of Airliners users combined.
In contrast to the magnitude of the accomplishment, disruptions to the users were constant throughout the operation of the airline industry, as Flighty estimated that approximately 3.9 million of users’ travel had been delayed in the form of over 15 minutes. The delayed times for the travellers were provided through the collection of data from each of the airlines to determine a total estimate of the number of hours lost by the community of airline users.
Why Ryanair Ranked the Highest
Ryanair, operating out of Ireland, was the highest-ranked airline globally by frequency of flights affected by delays for Flighty users, at 29 percent. That places Ryanair tied with Air France and easyJet for the number of flights affected by delay, showing that all airlines face operational issues, regardless of business model (full-service vs. low-cost).
According to Flighty, the high number of delayed flights for Ryanair is due in part to its vast European network as well as the large quantity of flights that Ryanair operates each day. With more flights, Ryanair has more opportunities for weather-related delays, air traffic delays and stoppages as a result of capacity at the airport.
Delays Are a Global Problem
Ten airlines that had the longest delays were from three geographical regions: North America, Europe and Australia. All flights were delayed at a similar rate regardless of where they were flying to or from. Frontier Airlines was just behind Ryanair in percentage of delayed flights, 28%. Lufthansa and Qantas were both at 26%, with KLM, Air Canada, JetBlue and Southwest each around 25%. In the United States, Frontier Airlines had the highest delay rate, followed by JetBlue, Southwest, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines.
A New Way to Measure Passenger Frustration
To provide additional information about passenger experience, Flighty also created another metric, “Get Me Off This Plane”, which measures the amount of time that passengers wait to exit from an aircraft after it has landed until they are able to leave. Traditional data on aircraft flight delays do not typically include the additional time that passengers must wait due to things such as not being able to get an aircraft to the gate or an aircraft being stuck on taxiways until it is able to reach the gate.
How Flighty Collected the Data
The Global Passport Report contains only commercial airlines; it does not include incentives for cargo, charter, or private aviation. In order for airlines to be included in the rankings, they must have a minimum of 150,000 flights within the year in question.
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