Flighty Reveals 2025's Most Delayed Airlines Ryanair Tops the Global List

If you've ever found yourself refreshing your flight app obsessively, wondering why your 'on-time' departure somehow turned into a 45-minute delay, you're not alone. Flighty, the popular flight tracking app, has just released its first-ever Global Passport Report — and the numbers are eye-opening for anyone who spends a lot of time in the air.

The report analyses tens of millions of flights from Flighty's user base throughout 2025, revealing everything from total distance travelled to — crucially for us frequent flyers — which airlines are most likely to leave you twiddling your thumbs at the gate.

First, the scale of what Flighty users have been up to this year is genuinely staggering. In 2025 alone, users tracked over 22 million flights, covering 34 billion miles and spending a cumulative 78 million hours in the air. To put that in perspective, that's 8,961 years of flight time.

As someone who's been racking up award flights this year, those numbers really hit home. Every Avios redemption, every status run, every 'quick trip' to mainland Europe — it all adds up. And apparently, we're not alone in our obsession with getting airborne.

Now for the part that'll likely spark some debate in the comments. When ranking airlines globally by delays, Ryanair came out on top as the most delayed carrier among Flighty users.

For UK readers, this might not come as a massive shock. We've all experienced the Ryanair shuffle — that peculiar dance of hope and disappointment when you're watching the departures board. Though to be fair, when you're paying £29 return to Malaga, a bit of unpredictability comes with the territory.

Across the pond, the top five most delayed US airlines were:

That American Airlines figure is worth noting if you're booking Avios redemptions to the US through oneworld partners. While BA's transatlantic operations aren't included in this specific ranking, it's useful context when weighing up connection times.

Here's the sobering bit: Flighty calculated that passengers collectively lost 3.9 million hours to delays in 2025. That's time spent waiting at gates, sitting on tarmacs, and watching departure times creep ever further into the future.

For those of us with tight connections or lounge access we're desperate to maximise, these delays can be properly disruptive. It's why I always check Flight Queue for estimated security times at Heathrow before heading to the airport — no point rushing through traffic only to spend two hours in the terminal because your flight's been pushed back.

This is my favourite part of the report. Flighty has introduced a brand new metric called 'Get Me Off This Plane' (yes, really), which measures the gap between your scheduled arrival time and when you actually get to step off the aircraft.

We've all been there. The pilot announces you've landed 'ahead of schedule,' and you feel a brief moment of joy — only to spend the next 25 minutes taxiing to a remote stand, waiting for a gate, or circling a congested taxiway. This metric captures all those invisible delays that don't show up in official on-time statistics but absolutely eat into your travel time.

As a BA Gold member who values every minute of lounge access, I find this metric incredibly useful. That 40-minute buffer you thought you had for your connection? It might be rather tighter than you realised.

You might be wondering why a flight tracking app matters when you're focused on maximising Avios or tier points. Here's the thing: information is power in the points game.

When you're booking award flights with tight connections — perhaps using our Award Travel Finder to snag a hard-to-find business class seat — knowing which airlines and routes are prone to delays can help you build in appropriate buffer time.

It also matters for status runs. If you're cramming multiple flights into a short timeframe to hit BA Silver or Gold, the last thing you want is a delay cascading through your entire itinerary. I learned this the hard way during my tier point run earlier this year.

The good news is that you can download Flighty and build your own 2025 Passport for free. The app will compile your flight stats, showing your total distance, time in the air, most-visited airports, and yes, how many hours you've personally lost to delays.

For Flighty Pro subscribers, there's even the ability to sync your entire flight history from Apple Calendar or bulk import past flights — handy if you want to see your lifetime stats.

Pair this with tools like Flight Seatmap for checking seat availability and Airport Lounge List for planning your pre-flight lounging, and you've got a solid toolkit for making the most of every journey.

Flighty's Global Passport Report is a fascinating snapshot of how we're all travelling in 2025. The Ryanair delay revelation won't surprise many UK travellers, but the sheer scale of time lost to delays — and the new 'Get Me Off This Plane' metric — provides valuable context for anyone planning their next points adventure.

My personal takeaway? Build in more buffer time than you think you need, especially when connecting through busy hubs. And maybe download Flighty before your next trip — if nothing else, it'll give you something to obsessively refresh while you're stuck on the tarmac.

Safe travels, and may all your flights depart on time.

Jack