Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many (a) flights of private non-scheduled aircraft and (b) individuals, including crew members, landed at UK airfields from 1 January 2020 to 18 May 2020; how many and what proportion of those flights were categorised as (i) private / general aviation, (ii) cargo, (iii) military and (iv) other; and what the five most common points of departure were for those flights.

I have been asked by the Department for Transport to respond to this question

Monitoring of flight traffic conducted by Eurocontrol shows that between 01 January 2020 and 30 April 2020 there were 14,225 aircraft arrivals at UK airports. An estimated categorisation of these aircraft arrivals based on Eurocontrol’s identification rules are provided in the table below. This data source does not provide information about the aircrafts’ point of departure or information about passengers or crew on board.

Information on passenger numbers are officially collected by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and received from applicable UK airports in adherence to statistical regulation (EC) 437/2003 on statistical returns in respect of the carriage of passengers, freight and mail by air. However, this data collection relates to commercial aircraft movements only.