A rise in the number of low-cost flights using Luton and Stansted airports has helped push the skies above London to capacity and seen the country’s airspace experience its busiest ever summer.

Some 736,800 planes entered UK airspace over the course of June, July and August this year, according to air traffic controller provider Nats, 5,683 more than the previous record set in 2017, and marking six consecutive years of growth.

Nats released the video above showing 24 hours of aircraft movements above London to highlight the pressure being placed on the capital’s airspace. It said that traffic into Luton and Stansted, has grown 30 per cent in the last four years and that demand now outstrips capacity at peak times of the day.

It is congestion in the skies in and around airports that leads to overwhelmed schedules and flight delays for passengers. At the beginning of the month, Ryanair, which operates out of Stansted, accused Nats of “blatant discrimination” over the rate of delays at the Essex airport compared to that of Heathrow, which it said received “special treatment”. Nats denied the accusation.

“It has been an incredibly busy summer and our teams have done a fantastic job safely managing what have been unprecedented levels of air traffic,” said Nats operation director Juliet Kennedy. “It’s been particularly pleasing to have done so without seeing the severity of capacity issues that have existed elsewhere in Europe.”

Nats said that this summer it handled - which can mean departing and arriving aircraft as well as those passing over the UK to and from North America - a quarter of all European air traffic, and said that its delay performance was “markedly better” than elsewhere on the Continent.

Figures from Iata, which represents the world’s airlines, this summer showed that delays more than double at airports across Europe, with 133 per cent more delayed minutes in the first half of 2018 than the same period last year.

Nats has previously warned that more and more passengers will find their flights delayed unless the Government invest heavily in updating the UK’s airspace. In 2016, Nats said that the number of delay minutes at UK airports could rise from 90,000 a year to four million by 2030.

The video released by Nats shows how London’s five key airports use different parts of the sky above the city to handle their flights, with Heathrow, the world’s seventh busiest airport, employing “stack” patterns to regulate arriving planes.

It is also possible to see the flights arriving and leaving London City Airport, which must obey strict steep approach and take-off rules to limit noise to surrounding communities.