Delays at Athens International Airport “Eleftherios Venizelos” have become the new normal, with only a handful of flights arriving or departing on schedule. Thousands of passengers have been packed into the terminal’s waiting areas, while the disruption has spilled outside the airport itself, with cars circling repeatedly as they wait to collect delayed travellers.

Between 18:00 and 19:00 today, July 21, of the 24 flights that landed at the airport, only seven arrived on time, while the remaining 17 were delayed by anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour. Over the same hour, according to the airport’s own website, all 15 scheduled departures left late. Between 19:00 and 20:00, all 21 scheduled departures were delayed, and of the 23 flights that landed, 18 arrived behind schedule. A similar pattern held for arrivals and departures between 20:00 and 21:00.

The situation worsens further in the evening, as delays build like a domino effect: a few minutes’ delay on a morning departure can grow into an hour or more by the time the aircraft works through its later routes for the day.

The European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol) has ranked Greece among the countries with the worst delays in Europe in recent weeks, recording a 63 percent rise in in-flight delays compared with last year. Eurocontrol noted that, in the last week of June, Greece accounted for 13 percent of all delays across Europe, with nine percent attributed to the Athens Area Control Centre and four percent to the Macedonia Area Control Centre, which covers northern Greece.

The delays stem mainly from capacity and staffing constraints, with a smaller additional factor being the increased flow of aircraft through Greek airspace due to the crisis in the Middle East. “As a result, in-flight delays in Greece are up 63 percent compared with the same period in 2025,” Eurocontrol said.

Last Saturday, 18 July, air traffic in Greek airspace hit a new record, with air traffic control staff handling a total of 5,082 flights in a single day.

According to the Hellenic Civil Aviation Authority (HCAA), this surpassed the previous daily record of 4,944 flights, set on 10 August 2024. The record set in August 2025, 4,916 flights, had already been broken on 4 July 2026, with 4,925 flights.

Based on current flight scheduling data, the upward trend is expected to continue throughout August 2026 and into the first two weeks of September 2026. Yesterday, however, the HCAA swore in 45 new air traffic controllers, bolstering staffing in what is a critical area for the smooth running of air transport and for optimising air traffic management.

The new controllers were drawn from the pool of successful candidates from the 2G/2024 recruitment announcement of ASEP, Greece’s Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection, and were chosen using FEAST, Eurocontrol’s First European Air Traffic Controller Selection Test, a modern and reliable assessment process run through ASEP. This was the first time the process had been used for this purpose; 80 air traffic controllers were initially appointed under it in October 2025.