Travelers Likely to Wait at Beijing Airport

Lunar New Year travellers queue at Beijing's international airport on Feb. 6, 2013. Beijing's Capital International Airport was ranked as the airport with most delayed flights in the world in a U.S. company's performance report. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Bejing’s international airport has the world’s most delayed flights, and Shanghai’s international airport comes in second place.

Eighty two percent of flights are delayed at the Beijing Capital International Airport while seventy one percent of flights at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport are delayed, according to a performance report by FlightStats, an American company that records information about flights around the world.

FlightStats defines a flight as “on time” if it falls within 15 minutes of its scheduled landing or takeoff times.

An associate professor at the Civil Aviation Management Institute of China, Zou Jianjun named Chinese airports’ inability to expand as fast as the number of airplanes had as the major reason for the excessive delays, according to state-run China Daily.

Zou dismissed the claims that flights were delayed due to air traffic. The United States has about six times the number of daily operating flights and manages to keep their delayed flight percentages in the low twenties, according to the performance report.

At the top of the list, the most on-time international airport is Haneda Airport in Tokyo, Japan with only five percent of its flights being delayed.