NEWCASTLE airport has come out top for punctuality in a national report.

The Civil Aviation Authority statistics show that 77 per cent of scheduled flights between July and September last year coming into and leaving Newcastle airport were on time.

The report classes "on time" as being no more than 15 minutes late.

This was better than the other airports in the report; Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, London City, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

For the same period, 68 per cent of charter flights were on time, which was the third highest in the survey.

These figures are in stark contrast to new flight delay statistics collected by Eurocontrol, which supervises aircraft movements between 24 countries.

These figures showed that passengers flying to and from the UK as a whole suffered the worst delays in Europe.

Planes in UK airspace last year accounted for 37 per cent of delays in Europe, which was 14 per cent higher than the previous year.

Planes using Heathrow were the most frequently delayed in the UK.

A spokesman for Teesside Airport said it did not publish delay figures as the way it collected statistics was not to an industry standard.